quatre par quatre; Poems from the French printable pdf

Philippe Soupault (1897-1990), along with André Breton and Louis Aragon, was the founder of the Surrealist movement, and collaborated with Breton on the first Surrealist document, Les Champs magnétiques. He would later be expelled from the movement for, in his words, “writing novels and smoking English cigarettes.” The poems translated here are from his later work, Sans Phrase (1953).
Jean Follain (1903-1971) first came to the attention of US poetry readers in W.S. Merwin’s as Transparence Of The World published in 1969. More recently a larger comprehensive selection of his work has been published by The Song Cave as Earthly, translated by Andrew Seguin. Follain is noted for his succinct haunting lyrics evocative the landscape of his native Normandy.
Michel Garnau (1939-2021)was a well-known Quebecois playwright and poet born in Montreal. The poems selected here are from poèmes du traducteur (poems of the translator) written while he was translating Leonard Cohen’s Book Of Longing, writing an original poem for each poem he translated. The friend who gifted me this edition called him “the Charles Bukowski of Montreal.”
Robert Hébert is a Montreal based poet and philosopher. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and things Quebecois. His most recent book is La Légende des incarnation (Note Bene, 2025). An interesting feature of Hébert’s is his use of code switching from French to English.
Pat Nolan was born in Montreal and grew up in a bilingual household.