Selected Poems

For the first time in English--an expansive collection of the poetry of Jean-Paul Auxeméry.

For the first time in English--an expansive collection of the poetry of Jean-Paul Auxeméry, representing over three decades of work inspired by muses ancient and modern. Tarn's careful translations capture Auxeméry's virtuosic style, paying homage to a poet whose own translation repertoire includes Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson.

"This keen-sighted "wanderer of Europe in confusion" taps ancient cultures around the world to trace the warp and woof in the "fabric of reality." Yet Auxeméry also turns to his immediate American forebears to understand "our human thirst" and the "how and why of trans-/substantiations," tapping Olson's poetic propulsion, Creeley's sinuous syllabic dance, and Pound's reinvention of history "as one might cook a dish." Nathaniel Tarn's energetic translation, sensitive to shadings and nuance of sound and sense, captures both the echoes of Auxeméry's masters and the poet's own distinctive voice."--Tess Lewis

"What an encounter! Tarn, a poet brought up in his mother's French and who subsequently, as a poet/anthropologist, migrated through numerous cultures and literary milieux to earn his place as one of the last living elders of American modernist poetry, here meets Auxeméry, a younger French-born poet whose global travels and mastery of divers languages have also taken him far from his native tongue in order, like Hölderlin or Olson, to rediscover a transfigured sense of the local. Both Tarn and Auxeméry, having undergone what Antoine Berman calls L'Épreuve de étranger--that is the trial of the foreign--here greet each other from amid their mutual histories of translation, learning to speak a common tongue."--Richard Sieburth

"This generous Selected Poems displays the disparities with such postwar poets from the preceding generation, given the formal expansiveness, multi-layeredness, exoticness, and narrative impetus in Auxeméry's oeuvre."--John Taylor, The Fortnightly Review

Poetry.