Jean Follain: 130 Poems

Shortlisted for the 2011 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translaton Prize

 

The poetry of Jean Follain (1903-1971) is increasingly seen, by poets and critics in France and by his foreign admirers, as central to French poetry€s change of course after Surrealism. The writer Henri Thomas spoke of Follain as a poet €œqui parle d€autre chose€, who speaks of things outside himself; he admired his freedom from rhetoric. Follain€s short, down-to-earth, subtle poems, many of which set out to preserve the lost rural world of his pre-war Norman childhood, have influenced a new generation of French poets. To anyone who still believes that modern French poetry is abstruse and over-cerebral, Follain€s memorable poems are the answer.