- Emily Dickinson
She's homely, the little cook but she touches the sky between the bread-board and the laundry-basket.
Heavy from loving those roses far beyond rose-bushes she flies off with the golden dust on the furniture.
Inside outside soft where hearts are stony she rains down and from the piano sleeping under the sea draws out a thousand thousand butterflies that keep the night at a distance.
(France: Éditions Gallimard, 2000.)
Guy Goffette is the author of six books of poems. Un manteau de fortune, published by Gallimard in 2001, received the Grand Prix de Poésie de l'Académie Française that year. He is also the author of Elle, par Bonheur et toujours nue, an imaginative essay/memoir about Bonnard, Verlaine d'ardoise et de pluie, a similarly idiosyncratic book on Verlaine, and, in 2005, L'Oeil de la baleine, an imaginative encounter with Auden. He was born in the Belgain Lorraine in 1947, but now lives in Paris where he is an editor at Gallimard. He received the Grand Prix de Poésie de la Société des Gens de Lettres in 1999 for the totality of his work. A book-length collection of his poems, in Marilyn Hacker's translation, Charlestown Blues, will be published by the University of Chicago Press.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of eleven books of poems, including Desesperanto (Norton, 2003) and Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Pres, U.K., 2006). She has also published six books of translations of work by Claire Malroux and by the Lebanese Francophone poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata. She received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. La Rue palimpseste, a collection of Hacker's poems translated into French by Claire Malroux, received the Prix Max Jacob étranger in 2005. Hacker lives in New York and Paris, and teaches at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center.