Wood Asleep: Bois dormant(8 Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets)

Gerard Mace's work challenges the barriers between poetry and the essay. This play between and within genres is essential to his writing which has been called essay merveilleux and derives from a questioning of language in its broadest sense. He is equally interested in the seductive musicality of words and in the remembered gestures which traced the hieroglyphs of Egypt and the calligraphic writing of the Far East. His fascination with dictionaries, grammars and glossaries leads him off on journeys in which the real and the imaginary are fused, but without being confused. He slips between words like a marvelling child constantly hoping that one day the world might be read like an open book. This edition brings together three series of prose poems, Le Jardin des langues (1974), Le balcon de Babel (1977) and Bois dormant (1983). Other books by Mace have as their subject literary figures such as Rimbaud, Corbiere, Nerval and Champollion, while Rome et le firmament and Lecon de chinois evoke places heavily charged with culture and history. Mace's other books include Vies anterieures (1991), which takes up the relationship between memory and writing, in the form of Lives (as in the Lives of saints or illustrious men), and La memoire aime chasser dans le noir (1993), which develops his fascination with the image the poetic image, dream image and photographic image. Timothy Mathews took over as Gerard Mace's translator for this edition following the death of David Kelley who had started work on the book. Jean-Pierre Richard is one of Europe's foremost literary critics. He has written not only on French poets but also on Stendhal, Flaubert and Proust. He has a wide following throughout Europe and the USA, and is admired particularly for his approachable and sensuous accounts of French writers.

About the Author :
Gerard Mace was born in Paris in 1946. He is a poet, essayist and translator. He published his first book Le jardin des langues in 1974 with Gallimard, at the age of 50. His work challenges the barriers between poetry and the essay. This play between and within genres is essential to his writing - which has been called essay merveilleux - and derives from a questioning of language in its broadest sense. His Bloodaxe title Wood asleep / Bois dormant brings together three series of prose poems, Le Jardin des langues (1974), Le balcon de Babel (1977) and Bois dormant (1983). Other books by Mace have as their subject literary figures such as Rimbaud, Corbiere, Nerval and Champollion, while Rome et le firmament and Lecon de chinois evoke places heavily charged with culture and history. Mace's other books include Vies anterieures (1991), which takes up the relationship between memory and writing, in the form of Lives (as in the Lives of saints or illustrious men), and La memoire aime chasser dans le noir (1993), which develops his fascination with the image - the poetic image, dream image and photographic image. David Kelley's translation of Lecon de chinois (1981), or Chinese Lesson, was published in The New French Poetry, edited by David Kelley and Jean Khalfa (Bloodaxe Books, 1996). Brian Evenson's translation of Le dernier des Egyptiens (1988) was published as The Last of the Egyptians by Burning Deck in 2011. Gerard Mace received the Grand Prix de Poesie, given by the Academie Francaise for his life's work, in 2008.