"The first full-length English translation of this celebrated French writer of the twentieth century, a penetrating and encompassing collection of her last works touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and-always-the body"--
The first full-length English translation of this celebrated French poet offers a penetrating and encompassing collection touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and—always—the body.
French literary icon Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) is known for an uncanny inhabitation of the concrete, finding whole worlds, even afterlives, in daily instances and spaces. “If I could seize a little nothing / a bit of nothing,” she muses, “all things would come to me / those that dance / in its cloth.” The tiniest moments can be acts of utterance, defiance, communion, and immortality. Yet death does indeed appear in the everyday, though it’s more than a fact of existence. It is fiction as well, small cunning stories we create so we’re not merely waiting for it: “one sets / close by / the pot of orange flowers / the here and now / to block the view.”
Here, the infinitesimal has no end; the smaller life gets, the deeper and more carefully Bancquart has us pause to notice its offerings. Though for her “the body” is the surest, most trustworthy way of knowing, the mystery of language is often referenced, and reverenced. And translator Jody Gladding, an award-winning poet herself, beautifully carries forward Bancquart’s lifetime of distinctive work. Every Minute Is First is lean, lucid yet philosophical poetry, reflecting visceral life and experiential thought, walking in the dark with a light, lighting words—or alighting on them—in their own incandescent power to make the long-lived journey meaningful.
Arvustused
Praise for Every Minute is First
This collection by a major French poet brings original perception and a gift for surreal detail to one of lifes essential crossroads: its nearing close. Objects claim their own agency; strangeness and side-leap remind at times of Jean Valentine; small acts of witness, invention, questioning, and memory feel dropped into a well without bottom. Suffusing these poems also: an enormous tenderness toward the existence its writer knows she soon will be leavingbut not yet.Ploughshares In Marie-Claire Bancquart's Every Minute Is First, endlessness goes inward. We encountervia images of ants and leaves, lungs breathing, a bar of white soapthe infinite divisibility of time, of daily life, the transitory nature of our bones and skin. Gladding's translation, visceral yet clear as glass, renders each poem as a lucid pane into a world that is eternally dissolving, eternally becoming, a world that doesnt refuse / to be broken like fresh bread. This collection brought me, again and again, to the place where eternity touches the body, a cleansed and renewed here and now, leaving me with the keen sense (and life-affirming reminder) that being able-bodied is a temporary state for all of us.Michael Bazzett, author of The Echo Chamber and translator of The Popol Vuh
[ In Every Minute Is First,] we instantly sense the connection between the human physical and the world around us, and it is both taut and trembling. [ . . .] We dont need to know the reference to the sparkle of the Eiffel Tower for it is all left open: Go change. Gladding points out Bancquarts practice and poem about living lightly. Even as we are cognizant of the poets learningand oursthat death isnt easy, we learn to know why every minute is indeed the first. How absolute / a moment!Mary Ann Caws, editor of The Yale Anthology of 20th Century French Poetry
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Preface
Other
In
On the Brink of Life
Yes, the Interval
Earth
Out of Scale
Forward
Falters, Wears Out
Grass Between the Lips
Alone
This Dark Tree
Red-Hot
In the woods leaves
If we speak in fables, its just
After having followed the formidable path, I will be
I hang my life
What is this face
What drives you
Black the water
The throat awakens full of dirt
When evening comes
Cut the round loaf, villager
Hearing
September, eleven oclock in the morning, without you
Replanting the hellebore
I desire you in our time
Worried about
Twenty or thirty centuries ago
Its sad
Scent of linden trees
At days end things join up
Under the curses of birds
What did you say? Lost empires
Writing
Little breaths, the moments of our lives
Our presence
Our lungs breathe
The decorum of words
The patient in the recovery room
The poor stone Im holding
Very dark matter
At that time, to represent an absurdity or strong emotion
Yes, heavy, the blood
The mirror retains
Into my spinal column
To be traversed
Tremble
As for me, I inhabited a large bird
How many trees in the course of this journey XXX
That trembling
Im endlessly obsessed with one desire
Briefly
Each thing according to
On window panes, curtains, books, camp the invisible
. . . At the border of the inexorable
No, I will not swallow
If I could seize a little nothing
Yes, I sank
I came back to life. Oh, monorail world, transport me
Dont descend
There are bruised words
Strange, the objects in certain categories
You know what it means
Can we
Inhale the strong odor of the streets
We dont want
Against my cheek
See you shortly, in the unknown
To the heights of incandescence
When do you want to divorce yourself
When I think of you, I transform into tree-lined paths
I dont believe in heaven
To approach a word
Every minute is first, when the garden
As though
Return the love of the least things
For the music of stones
And nevertheless I pressed against your face my own
Youve got a run in your peritoneum
Sitting in the park
Collect a seed
Were always holding the end of the world, no matter where
A very ripe apricot gets smashed
Pain: explosion, spasms
What have you done, if not
Im writing a letter to I dont know whom
In my body theres
Holes in the bark
Every morning I form
Dont wake me sleeper
Small noise, rain
Following the edge of an island
. . . But so far off, so unrealized, the peace Im seeking
New world
End-of-life accompanist
Its possible/impossible
With your chagrin, you meant to stay alone
Its as if there were an earth above
. . . But what if it were absurd, our turmoil
Sick
Then a scene imposes itself upon you, impossibly banal: a man
She doesnt have a name
How I searched for you, life
Why this feeling of exile
A very large white pigeon
These are my Sorrows Im writing
So soft, the gray of the sky sometimes occupied by white
Nevertheless love
As if the earth
In a little while, I will no longer be, you will no longer be
Notes
Marie-Claire Bancquart (19322019) is the author of Every Minute Is First and more than thirty other collections of poetry and several novels. In her lifetime she was the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Prix Supervielle, the Prix Max Jacob, and the Prix Robert Ganzo. Bancquart was also president of the French arts council La Maison de la Poésie and a professor emerita of the Université Paris-Sorbonne, where she taught French literature until her retirement in 1994. She lived in Paris for most of her life with her husband, Alain Bancquart, a musician and composer.
Jody Gladding is a poet and translator with five books of poems and forty translations from French by authors such as Roland Barthes, Jean Giono, Julia Kristeva, and Pierre Michon. She has published three previous books with Milkweed Editions, including her own poetry in the books Rooms and Their Airs and Translations from Bark Beetle as well as a translation of Geneviève Damass novel If You Cross the River, which was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. She has won the Whiting Award, Yale Younger Poets Award, and numerous others for her poetry and was a finalist for the 2004 French-American Foundation Translation Prize with Jean Gionos The Serpent of Stars. Gladding has taught in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and has lived in France for extended periods over the last twenty-five years. Her most recent poetry collection is I entered without words. She lives and works in East Calais, Vermont.
