Les Pensees

She survived war when her family did not, battled for liberty with the French Underground, and fell in love with an American doctor in Paris. And throughout her too-short lifetime, she recorded her innermost thoughts and impressions with intensely personal poems.

The daughter of a French physician, Lucienne Hollard McKay's poetry reflects many of her thoughts, her moods, her intimations. In them one finds pain as well as gaiety; and fantasy, delight, and ecstasy. Tremendously personal, the poems are set down in the author's native French and were never intended for publication.

To honor Lucienne's memory after her passing, her husband selected more than fifty of these poems to share with the world. They appear herein, filled with all the nuances and delicate iridescence of their original expression. Translated with dedicated friendship by Lilian Polk, the English poems appear side-by-side, next to the romantic language in which they were created.

In these poems, daydreams commingle with reality, life and death are interwoven, and always there is an ethereal beauty-even in the midst of tragedy.

Lucienne Hollard knew the mighty and the lowly, enjoyed the society of the famous, and worked closely with the nameless ones of the French Underground during World War II. Everywhere her life took her, she remained a dauntless spirit with an unbounded verve for whatever life brought. No other memorial could conceivably preserve, as if still alive, the exquisite personality of its author.