Homesick for the Earth

Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) was born to French parents in Montevideo, orphaned within a year of his birth, and grew up in Uruguay and France. He spent the Second World War exiled in Uruguay, afflicted by ill health and financial ruin. His poems are dreamlike, often gently fantastical, imbued with an appealing surface clarity. His work stands apart from much 20th-century French poetry, and he has been characterized as a writer of Basque descent who wrote in French but in the Spanish tradition, with a strong affinity for the open spaces of his South American childhood. In many respects he seems our contemporary, a writer of highly personal poems as well as poems concerned with war and the environment.