Contemporary French poetry has long been tagged as being overly cerebral and hermetic. But there exists a very different, thriving tradition which is too often muffled by noisier movements like Surrealism or Minimalism. Into the Deep Street’ gives voice to this tradition. What links the poets is an acute awareness of the existential instant in both its inward workings and also, crucially, in its outwardness – in the street, on the move.
From the key figure of Jean Follain, who can freeze an entire period of history in a vignette of a few lines, via the best-known of the close-knit if regionally scattered group, Philippe Jaccottet, to the newer voices of Guy Goffette and Gilles Ortlieb, all these poets are masters of wry brevity and the resonant image.
Jennie Feldman’s first collection of poems, The Lost Notebook’, was published by Anvil in 2005, as was her selection and translation from Jacques Réda’s poems, Treading Lightly’. She lives in Jerusalem.
Stephen Romer has been Maître de conférences at the University of Tours since 1991. His anthology 20th Century French Poems’ was published by Faber in 2002. The latest of his four collections of poetry, Yellow Studio’, was published by Carcanet in 2008.

Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008 (French and English Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Jacques Réda

Jean Follain

Henri Thomas

Philippe Jaccottet

Paul de Roux

Guy Goffette

Gilles Ortlieb

Poetry

Anvil Press Poetry

Fiction. Translated from the French by Aaron Prevots. RETURN TO CALM, published in French in 1989 and appearing here as a full bilingual edition, immerses the reader in Jacques Reda's lyrical observations of the everyday. Its seven distinct sections offer reflections on youth, on travel in open country, on seasons, on Paris and on remembrance itself. They provide a rhythmic initiation into the outer world's beauty, through the eyes of a writer deeply attuned to the passing of time and space.

Return to Calm (English and French Edition)

Host Publications

From Belleville to Passy, from Montmartre to La-Butte-aux-Cailles, from Antony to Saint-Ouen – Jacques Réda is a traveler in his own city of Paris. In the tradition of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, he is a nervous, rather unleisurely flâneur, unsettling and subverting preconceived ideas about travel and home. The Ruins of Paris echoes with the footsteps and the words of a wanderer by turns gloomy, curious, troubled, elated, angry, tender and confused (and sometimes all these things at once). We are led through the arrondissements and suburbs of Paris and beyond in a journey that moves to the rhythm of walking, of trains, to the hopeful tempo of upbeat jazz. Réda the wanderer is forever on the move: he constantly sets off, stops, begins afresh, treasuring movement itself while journeying from place to place. Journeys that are at once exhilarating and familiar, journeys that mirror life itself and a world that ceaselessly rises anew from its own ruins. Jacques Réda's book is both a poetic meditation on Paris and a haunting companion to its views and moods. "In France, Jacques Réda's prose writings are passed back and forth between friends with the enthusiastic secret-sharing that one associates with fan clubs. Membership requirements include a taste for precise, tenderly ironic prose, polished to a delicacy of finish rarely attained by contemporary French writers."—John Taylor, Times Literary Supplement

Ruins of Paris (Topographics)

Essays & Correspondence

Reaktion Books

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Books by Jacques Réda