A bit of poetry: Ocean Vuong, Joseph Brodsky, and Éditions Seghers

Night Sky with Exit Wounds followed by Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

To mark the French release of Ocean Vuong’s second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, Gallimard is bringing together in paperback the two poetry collections of the young American writer. His first collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2017. His second collection, Time Is a Mother, was published in 2022. The latter may be more accessible, as it centers on the loss of the mother. The first collection, by contrast, often emphasizes the father figure, particularly as an obstacle to living one’s sexual orientation freely. For sex is a recurring subject in Ocean Vuong’s poems. Beyond the intimate, the American poet of Vietnamese origin also explores major moments in American history, such as 9/11, the assassination of Kennedy, and the Vietnam War. The images he conjures are numerous, often hermetic, and the fragmented form does not necessarily make them easier to understand, reflecting instead the lyrical wanderings of the writer.

Like a Torch, in This Black Darkness. Poetic Anthology 1961-1996 by Joseph Brodsky

On an entirely different level are the poems of Joseph Brodsky, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987. This Russian poet, who came to fame late, drew the wrath of the Soviet leadership. At 24, he was sentenced to five years of administrative exile for “parasitism.” His verses were the cause. “Not that they were subversive: they conveyed no political message, no ideology. They were, quite simply, something else: something for which the official nomenclature had no place, the official language no name, the official thought no adequate category.” (Michel Aucouturier) In 1987, only four of Brodsky’s poems were published in the USSR… Things have changed, and today Brodsky is recognized and read in Russia. Inspired by Osip Mandelstam, Yevgeny Baratynsky, and Anna Akhmatova, but also and above all by English poets (Eliot, Auden, and John Donne), this great traveler found his inspiration in a horse, a place, love, a date… Brodsky’s original stanza forms and intricate combinations of difficult rhymes still make his poems true literary objects. The collection published here presents only a third of what Brodsky wrote… André Markowicz has revisited the translations by Michel Aucouturier and Véronique Schilltz previously published by Gallimard, while also translating unpublished poems composed between 1990 and 1996 (a prolific period for Brodsky).

The PS collection at Editions Seghers

A brief word too about the PS collection at Editions Seghers. “PS as in Post scriptum. PS as in The Consonants of the pot P(oe)S(try). PS as in Poésie Seghers.” This collection of short volumes, priced at 5 euros each and pocket-sized, offers a way to approach great poets. Romances by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore introduces a poetess at the forefront of Romanticism, praised by Balzac and Verlaine a few years later. Of German origin, Rainer Maria Rilke published The Roses in French. The Deep Life offers poems drawn from Anna de Noailles’ collection The Innumerable Heart, published in 1901. Finally, the most recent collection (1946) is André Breton’s The Hard Desire to Endure, made up of nineteen texts deeply marked by the Second World War.