Rue Traversière

‘Yves Bonnefoy is one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime,’ says Paul Auster. Rue Traversière, written in 1977,is one of Yves Bonnefoy’s most harmonious prose works. Each of the 15 discrete or linked texts, whose length ranges from brief notations to the long, intense, self-questioning pages, is a work of art in its own right: brief and richly suggestive as haiku, or long and intricately wrought in syntax and thought; and all are as rewarding in their sounds and rhythms, and their lightning flashes of insight as any sonnet. ‘I can write all I like; I am also the person who looks at the map of the city of his childhood, and doesn’t understand,’ says the text that gives the book its title as it revisits childhood cityscapes in an exploration of the tricks memory plays on us.

A mixture of genres—the prose poem, the personal essay, quasi-philosophical reflections on time, memory and art—it is a book of at times epigrammatic concision, at other times dreamlike narratives that follow and lay open the meanders of the poet’s thought as he struggles to understand and express some of the undercurrents of human life. For the Bonnefoy reader, the book’s layered texts will echo and elaborate on one another, as well as on aspects of Bonnefoy’s poetics and thought.