In the Flesh of the Text: The Poetry of Marie-Claire Bancquart (Collection Monographique Rodopi en Littérature Française Contemporaine, 47)

This closely focused study of the inner movements, dynamic tensions and tactile richness of an intensely sensual but deeply searching poetry, is the first full-length monograph devoted to one of France’s foremost contemporary woman poets. Marie-Claire Bancquart’s work explores, primarily through the vulnerabilities and sensitivities of the body (hence this book’s ‘carnal’ title), the possibility of releasing a cry: a salvation of language and spirit from indifference, abstraction and dehumanisation, a celebration of a moment’s reunion with the recreative vitality of the physical universe, an act of love in its most private yet cosmic expression. Bancquart has described her language as a ‘braille of the living’: minimal, interrupted and riddled with obscurities and gaps of the unsayable, but apprehending the world and composing its significance in a singularly tactile translation. This study will appeal to those keen to discover one of the most original voices of present-day European poetry, the distinctive poetic resonances of one of its most self-aware and vibrant female sensibilities, and the provocative orientations of ‘new writing’ traversed by the dilemmas and paradoxes of our own era.

Peter Broome is a well-known specialist of modern French poetry, with major books on Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, André Frénaud and Louise Herlin. He is also a prolific translator, having produced bilingual editions of Jean-Charles Vegliante’s collection Les Oublies, Bancquart’s Énigmatiques and, most recently, a wide-ranging anthology of Frénaud’s work, Selected poems, 1938-1986.