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Every Minute Is First - by Marie-Claire Bancquart (Paperback)

Every Minute Is First - by  Marie-Claire Bancquart (Paperback) - 1 of 1
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About this item

Highlights

  • A penetrating and encompassing English-language translation from the celebrated French poet touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and--always--the body.French literary icon Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932-2019) is known for an uncanny inhabitation of the concrete, finding whole worlds, even afterlives, in daily instances and spaces.
  • About the Author: Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932-2019) is the author of Every Minute Is First and more than thirty other collections of poetry and several novels.
  • 136 Pages
  • Poetry, Women Authors

Description



About the Book



"The first full-length English translation of this celebrated French writer of the twentieth century, a penetrating and encompassing collection of her last works touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and-always-the body"--



Book Synopsis



A penetrating and encompassing English-language translation from the celebrated French poet touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and--always--the body.

French literary icon Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932-2019) is known for an uncanny inhabitation of the concrete, finding whole worlds, even afterlives, in daily instances and spaces. "If I could seize a little nothing / a bit of nothing," she muses, "all things would come to me / those that dance / in its cloth." The tiniest moments can be acts of utterance, defiance, communion, and immortality. Yet death does indeed appear in the everyday, though it's more than a fact of existence. It is fiction as well, small cunning stories we create so we're not merely waiting for it: "one sets / close by / the pot of orange flowers / the here and now / to block the view."

Here, the infinitesimal has no end; the smaller life gets, the deeper and more carefully Bancquart has us pause to notice its offerings. Though for her "the body" is the surest, most trustworthy way of knowing, the mystery of language is often referenced, and reverenced. And translator Jody Gladding, an award-winning poet herself, beautifully carries forward Bancquart's lifetime of distinctive work. Every Minute Is First is lean, lucid yet philosophical poetry, reflecting visceral life and experiential thought, walking in the dark with a light, lighting words--or alighting on them--in their own incandescent power to make the long-lived journey meaningful.



Review Quotes




Praise for Every Minute is First

"This collection by a major French poet brings original perception and a gift for surreal detail to one of life's essential crossroads: its nearing close. Objects claim their own agency; strangeness and side-leap remind at times of Jean Valentine; small acts of witness, invention, questioning, and memory feel dropped into a well without bottom. Suffusing these poems also: an enormous tenderness toward the existence its writer knows she soon will be leaving--but not yet."--Ploughshares
"In Marie-Claire Bancquart's Every Minute Is First, endlessness goes inward. We encounter--via images of ants and leaves, lungs breathing, a bar of white soap--the infinite divisibility of time, of daily life, the transitory nature of our bones and skin. Gladding's translation, visceral yet clear as glass, renders each poem as a lucid pane into a world that is eternally dissolving, eternally becoming, a world that 'doesn't refuse / to be broken like fresh bread.' This collection brought me, again and again, to the place where eternity touches the body, a cleansed and renewed here and now, leaving me with the keen sense (and life-affirming reminder) that being able-bodied is a temporary state for all of us."--Michael Bazzett, author of The Echo Chamber and translator of The Popol Vuh

"[In Every Minute Is First, ] we instantly sense the connection between the human physical and the world around us, and it is both taut and trembling. [. . .] We don't need to know the reference to the sparkle of the Eiffel Tower for it is all left open: 'Go change.' Gladding points out Bancquart's practice and poem about living lightly. Even as we are cognizant of the poet's learning--and ours--that death isn't easy, we learn to know why every minute is indeed the first. How 'absolute / a moment!'"--Mary Ann Caws, editor of The Yale Anthology of 20th Century French Poetry




About the Author



Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932-2019) is the author of Every Minute Is First and more than thirty other collections of poetry and several novels. In her lifetime she was the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Prix Supervielle, the Prix Max Jacob, and the Prix Robert Ganzo. Bancquart was also president of the French arts council La Maison de la Poésie and a professor emerita of the Université Paris-Sorbonne, where she taught French literature until her retirement in 1994. She lived in Paris for most of her life with her husband, Alain Bancquart, a musician and composer.

Jody Gladding is a poet and translator with five books of poems and forty translations from French by authors such as Roland Barthes, Jean Giono, Julia Kristeva, and Pierre Michon. She has published three previous books with Milkweed Editions, including her own poetry in the books Rooms and Their Airs and Translations from Bark Beetle as well as a translation of Geneviève Damas's novel If You Cross the River, which was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. She has won the Whiting Award, Yale Younger Poets Award, and numerous others for her poetry and was a finalist for the 2004 French-American Foundation Translation Prize with Jean Giono's The Serpent of Stars. Gladding has taught in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and has lived in France for extended periods over the last twenty-five years. Her most recent poetry collection is I entered without words. She lives and works in East Calais, Vermont.

Dimensions (Overall): 8.4 Inches (H) x 5.3 Inches (W) x .6 Inches (D)
Weight: .45 Pounds
Suggested Age: 22 Years and Up
Number of Pages: 136
Genre: Poetry
Sub-Genre: Women Authors
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Format: Paperback
Author: Marie-Claire Bancquart
Language: English
Street Date: April 9, 2024
TCIN: 89448358
UPC: 9781639550906
Item Number (DPCI): 247-04-3867
Origin: Made in the USA or Imported
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Shipping details

Estimated ship dimensions: 0.6 inches length x 5.3 inches width x 8.4 inches height
Estimated ship weight: 0.45 pounds
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