Some Thing Black - Hardcover

Roubaud, Jacques; Waldrop, Rosmarie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0916583481 ISBN 13: 9780916583484

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990

Synopsis

In 1983 Jacques Roubaud s wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem ( Nothing ), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud poet, novelist, mathematician composed a series of prose poems, a collection that is a profound mediation on the experience of death, the devastation it brings to the lover who goes on living, and the love that remains. Despite the universality of this experience, no other writer has so devoted himself to exploring and recording the many-edged forms of grief, mourning, bewilderment, emptiness, and loneliness that attend death. No other writer has provided a kind of solace while facing with honesty and hardness the intricate ways in which the living are affected by such a loss. Some Thing Black is an ongoing monologue from Roubaud to his wife, as death assaults the mind s failure to comprehend absence. Roubaud both refuses to and cannot surrender his wife to the past ( I always wake up in your voice, your hand, your smell ). The death, having occurred in an instant of time, goes on in him ( But inside me your death proceeds slowly, incomprehensibly ). While acknowledging death calls for a poetry of meditation, Roubaud is enraged at the limitations of language and words to affect the biological reality. Rather, all that language can do is clarify the exactness of his grief and to recall precisely the image of her life and death. But such recollection the sight of her dead body, her photographs, her things, the rooms they lived in becomes a memory infinitely torturous. And his most anguished recollection is of their making love ( These memories are the darkest of all ), and a sense of guilt for somehow not having prevented her death ( I did not save you from that difficult night ). This is a brave and honest book that does not disguise that pain of loss. Its nobility, grace, and humanity rest in its refusal to falsify death s harsh presence ( This dirty rotten life to be mixed up with death ) and in its acceptance of the mind s limitations ( I do not understand ). This moving, compassionate, uncompromising book is one of the most significant works of our time. Included in this edition is a portfolio of photographs made by Roubaud s wife in 1980 entitled If Some Thing Black.

About this title

Product Description

The book is brand new and will be dispatched from UK.

Review

"It is an elegy for our time, in that it rejects the heaven which opens for Beatrice and the ghosts which survive in the atheism of Hardy, and in that it explores overtly the relation between poetry and death. Roubaud asks in effect how one can write about a dead lover, how one can 'say' her--how one can get from the silence or groanings, which alone seem proper, to a work of poetry. By pursuing his hostility to poetry he discovers a language which is usable, and by continuously facing death he descends progressively further into the meaning of poetry. He has written a thoroughly modern 'love poem.'" -- Michael Edwards, Times Literary Supplement "No work of recent French poetry, indeed of recent French literature, is more moving than Some Thing Black... [O]ne reads Some Thing Black from the first sentence on with breath withheld, as if one had forgotten (and perhaps one had) that the richest poetry communicates, not only sounds and ideas and images, but also emotions... So emotionally powerful and technically original are these poems that they should be situated not only within the context of recent French poetry, but also within the long history of the poem of mourning in European literature... In nearly every poem of Some Thing Black particulars haunt one as universals. Which is the hallmark of a lasting work of art... Roubaud succeeds in creating an original, unforgettable poetic equivalent for that complex state of mind and feeling which arises in the presence of death. The most complex intellectual and emotional state that man can know." -- Asylum

Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0916583481
• ISBN 13: 9780916583484
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160