The form of a city changes faster, alas, than the human heart.

Translation by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop

Dalkey Archive Press, ISU Campus Box 8905, Normal, IL 61790-8905, USA

www.dalkeyarchive.com

Due for publication July 2006

£8.99 paperback, 247 pp

Jacques Roubaud, born in 1932, is one of the members of the Oulipo, the ‘workshop for experimental literature’, whose members have included Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino and Harry Mathews. The Oulipo group used self-imposed formal "constraints" when writing.

The one hundred and fifty poems in The form of a city changes faster, alas, than the human heart are a homage both to the city of Paris and to some of France’s best-known poets, such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Raymond Queneau.

            With a playful, yet poignant tone, reminiscent at times of the New York poets, Roubaud takes us on a trip through the individual streets and squares of Paris, commenting on the city’s inhabitants, writers, history and possible future.

            The book is divided into sections, whose names immediately make you want to read more: ‘Rerunning the Streets’, ‘Six Little Logical Pieces’, ‘Undated Night, Rue Saint-Jacques’.

The poems like to puncture themselves unexpectedly at the end. For example, in ‘Metro’, Roubaud humorously laments the changes that have taken place in Paris:

‘In those days

The steps of the stairs were of Carborundun

(Whose chemical

Formula you knew to be WC (W for

“Wolfram” (which is a pseudonym of “Tungsten”), and C,

For “Carbon” ))

More indestructible than diamond

You gave up your seat for women pregnant to their hind teeth

Dyspeptic old men

And peroxide blondes

But not for veterans

Of either 1870 or 1914

Who in a rage would pull out their handicap card

Lift their pantleg above the ankle

Show their scars

And take the crowd to witness’

He ends with:

‘But in those days

There was no station christened

BOBIGNY-PANTIN-RAYMOND QUENEAU

Right?

This

Makes up for

That’

There is a delight in the use of formal structures, without which there might be a danger of some of the poems degenerating into mere autobiographical whimsy: among others, you will find rhyming sonnets, visual and sound poems, haiku-like poems, and prose poems. It goes almost without saying that some of these must have posed a considerable challenge to the translators, even if in this case the translators happen to be Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. They have obviously done their utmost to reflect both the form and the tone of the originals. Take for example, ‘Sonnet I’:

   A girl in love, excited, at the Main

Post Office (Louvre) thrusts a letter in

Her fingers tremble and her palms are sweaty

She blushes, hurrying, anxious and troubled.

   But now my curiosity is doubled

Or ‘Plesent Streets’:

pecked peclet street!

peeled pêle-mêle pelée street!

perched pernelle street!

perfected perrée street!

petted petel street!

petrels in petrel street!

presence preserves de presles street!

I guess it would have been useful to have had the original French text on the facing page, but that would have doubled the size and no doubt the price of this book.

One has a picture the whole time of Roubaud wandering the streets of Paris, an outsider, an observer, both happy and sad to be alone. But the humour, the mocking tone is always there:

Today was a good day

Three times I was asked directions

1.      A Japanese couple was looking for the Opera

On avenue de l’Opéra

2.      A man from the provinces was looking for the church Notre-

Dame des Victoires on

                        Place Notre-Dame-des-Victoires

3.      A young woman was looking for the Rue du Général-Delestraint

Right at the exit of Métro Porte-de-Saint-Cloud

Really it was a good day

            Many of the poems talk to the poems of other writers, reminisce about times spent together. From ‘A Poem for Claude Roy’.

he said

“Who will wake up at the end of my dream”

he said

“In back of the shadow there is a song”

or

“The clock’s pendulum in winter”

that’s how poems began in those days

though a poem begun might never get finished

you couldn’t know

of all the poems dashed onto the page

would one, on turning, end up in the black?

            Roubaud’s book is highly readable, enjoyable on first and further readings. My own favourite is the prose poem, ‘The Street’, in which the narrator while walking is haunted by a recollection he can’t pin down of another street from the past. The ‘other street’ becomes a symbol for a kind of alternate universe, without the poem ever losing its easy, colloquial turn of phrase: ‘When I’d be in the past of that other street, I’d know it. But how?’

            It has to be said that a few  of the poems are really no more than lists, of street names for example. This can get a little dull, and the word games and references can seem self-indulgent and irritating after a while. As an ex-resident of Paris, I would have liked Jacques Roubaud to take me further into the city by saying a little more about its distinctive smells and sounds.

            This gripe aside,  Jacques Roubaud is a rewarding and enjoyable read. Several of his books are now available in English. If you are not familiar with his work (I have to confess I wasn’t), The form of a city changes faster… would seem like a good place to start.

Reviewer: Ian Seed

EMMA LEW

Anything the Landlord Touches

Shearsman Books

www.shearsman.com

£8.95 / $14, paperback, 80pp

It’s quite a while since I picked up a collection as mesmerising as Anything the Landlord Touches. Apart from the irresistible title of the book, each poem has lines which jump out of the page or which immediately intrigue or which make my head do a funny turn. To give just a few examples:

‘Once my foot was like a cube of sugar’

                                  ‘It was like a rain,

the world, and his eyes loved faint things.’

‘Yesterday I had so much faith, I would have given half as much again to stray.’

‘If a man delights in the tiny feet of his wives,

he may wish to unravel the bindings himself.’

                                                            ‘The street below

had just begun to heal.’

‘He is troubled by her long caress.

He sees himself elsewhere, digging in the hardened ground.’

What makes the poems work so well is not only their lyricism, but their shifting perspectives and the dramatic intensity behind the lyricism. Each poem appears to be spoken or narrated by a character. The characters seem often to be tied to historical events (although these are usually not specified) and are full of an individuality which brings them to life in a very short space (most of the poems are less than a page long). Yet the narrators could equally well serve as archetypes and be transported into other situations.  Although their stories are coherent, there is jagged hallucinatory quality throughout. I was reminded of Anna Kavan’s novel, ‘Ice’ on more than one occasion. Some kind of trauma appears to be at the heart of the poems, all the more horrific because we are never told what it is. It’s easy enough for us to imagine. Take this from ‘The True Dark Town’ (not a great title, I agree):

The snows were melting but I wanted to speak.

Swollen and undressed, filling the roads.

The mountain, so beautiful. We were afraid.

     Death buttoned my coat.

I smelled their odour when they came

down the incoherent paths of the mountain.

The petals of the flower were hushed.

                           It’s the blood from that night.

A child has sheltered her book with her body.

A man was seen hoarding. Who can be sure?

This is the only thing I have rescued.

    It’s pitiful.

[…]

The past will be a bitter land.

I do not trust the face of my father.

This made me think immediately of the slaughters in the Balkans in the 90’s, but it could equally well be applied to ordinary lives in any war. At the same time, the poem has a timeless, fairytale atmosphere. We are dealing with individuals but also with classical characters:  riders, adventurers, murderers, golden girls, travellers, tycoons, men ‘coming back as birds’:

In the office he unfolded the papers.

Other times I saw him press his pencil

harder, and still make no sense. We were watching. […]

Genius who made night in his little room,

he drove himself from rain to hail,

with his rigid thanks (‘there is something

wrong with me’), wounding himself

where the buses go up the street. […]

What country did he mean: ‘shining

in its illness’? I think he saw a moment

where he could fly up emerald, make

his mark – as if his axes cut down nothing,

as if he had been crossing bridges all his life.

There is a vital energy in the poems. Lew is not just playing clever games with words (I enjoy those kinds of poems too, by the way, when they work) or being lyrical or dramatic for the sake of it  – she has something she wants to tell us. Each poem is ‘a poem of nails’. She shares perhaps something in common with Mark Strand and the poets of the ‘Deep Image’. One weakness of the poems is that certain words do crop up rather too often: ‘moon’, ‘dark’, ‘wound’, ‘soul’ for example. Yet at the same time there is a playfulness in her choice of phrase, which, most of the time, stops her sinking into melodrama. She can be ice-cold and sinister, too, as in ‘Prey’:

I was wrestling with a list, perhaps posing as a cop

And I wrapped my fingers around your throat. Did you panic?

I’m not an expert, I don’t know the terminology

They were looking for a guy who was ghoulish or foamed

It’s a slow road with a lot of curves

Maybe I should have toyed with her more

Emma Lew lives in Melbourne and is highly regarded among Australian poets, but is perhaps not so well known here in the UK. My guess is that this will change soon. Instead of spending that nine quid on the next round of drinks, why not get hold of a copy of Anything the Landlord Touches?

Reviewer:  Ian Seed