Wood asleep: Bois dormant (Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets)

Gerard Mace's work challenges the barriers between poetry and the essay. This play between and within genres is essential to his writing-which has been called essai merveilleux-and derives from a questioning of language in its broadest sense. He is equally interested in the seductive musicality of words and in the remembered gestures that traced the hieroglyphs of Egypt and the calligraphic writing of the Far East. His fascination with dictionaries, grammars, and glossaries leads him off on journeys in which the real and the imaginary are fused, but without being confused. He slips between words like a marveling child. This edition brings together three series of prose poems from the 70s and early 80s.