Black Salt: Poems

Poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist Édouard Glissant, born in Martinique in 1928, is one of the most important contemporary writers in French. Black Salt collects two decades of Glissant's poetry and makes it available for the first time in English. It is a poetry that is aesthetically distinguished and historically significant, characterized by potent metaphors of local identity.Published in France as Le Sel Noir, the volume brings together in English translation three separate poetry collections from Glissant's early years, Le Sang Rivé (Blood Riveted), Le Sel Noir (Black Salt), and Boises (Yokes). Read together, these three works embody Glissant's project to develop a Caribbean literature no longer contained by European language. He incorporates conventions of orality and ties the poems concretely to a Martiniquan experience of history and geography/geology, expressing an ongoing search for identity in a struggle between memory and forgetting. From Riveted Blood through Black Salt to Yokes, Glissant can be seen to be developing a poetic instrument that is increasingly stark and increasingly particularized as it undergoes inflections that derive from oral and Creole sources and simultaneously opens to the local landscape, the traditional culture, and the history of Martinique.Édouard Glissant is Distinguished Professor of French, City University of New York, Graduate Center. His other books in English include Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation, and Faulkner Mississippi, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Betsy Wing's translations include Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault, and Hélène Cixous's The Book of Promethea.