Jean Follain

"The poetry of Jean Follain" (1903-1971) is increasingly recognized, by French poets and critics and by his foreign admirers, as central to French poetry's change of course after the Surrealist period. The poet and novelist Henri Thomas wrote of Follain as one of the poets"qui parle d'autre chose", rather than of himself; he admired Follain as a poet remarkably free of rhetoric. Follain's short, down-to-earth, subtle poems have influenced a new generation of French poets. To anyone who still believes that modern French poetry is abstruse and over-cerebral, Follain's delightful and memorable poems are the answer.

Christopher Middleton, the leading poet and translator, has chosen poems spanning Follain's writing life, from" La Main chaude" (1933) to "Espaces d'instants" (1971). He has written an illuminating introduction to his elegant translations.