Unfinished Ode to Mud

Shortlisted for the 2009 Popescu Prize for European poetry in translation

A bilingual French/English edition of new translations of prose poems by a writer praised by Italo Calvino as a peerless master . . . I believe that he may be the Lucretius of our time, reconstructing the physical nature of the world by means of the impalpable, powderfine dust of words
- Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Still radical, the poems of Francis Ponge seek to give the things of the world their due. Impatient with the usual baggage of literary description, Ponge attends to a pebble, a washpot, an eiderdown, a platter of fish, with lyrical precision; playing with sounds, rhythms and associations of words, he creates wholly new objects but which may be more touching, if possible, than natural objects, because human ( My Creative Method ).