Lightning: The Poetry of Rene Char

LIGHTNING, THE POETRY OF RENE CHAR- by NANCY KLINE PIORE with a foreword by Anna Balakian · The poetry of Rene’ Char is a study in opposition: terse, yet beautifully expressive, revealing, and at the same time elliptical. Designated by Camus as “France’s greatest living twentieth century poet,” Char has managed to both charm and elude those who would categorize his work. In Nancy Kline Piore, he has met with an astute and sympathetic critic who provides the reader with a key to the poet’s enigmatic world. She likens him to the images found in his work. “He spins from his own center, and from the center of his own life,” she writes, “and all the work glimmers with the tension between disclosure and concealment.” · Rene’ Char is a solitary poet, yet an artist with strong bonds both to his fellow man and to the natural world; Nancy Kline Piore explores both facets of his work in this careful study. In a final discussion she places Char within the context of Fr