Birds, by St.-John Perse ; With Reproductions of Four Original Color Etchings by George Braque

pp. 71. Oblong 4to., measuring 11" x 14" [28 x 36 cm]. Publisher's original tan cloth over boards with gilt lettering to the spine. Four striking illustrated colour plates by noted French painter, draughtsman, and printmaker, Georges Braques, especially reproduced for this book. No detectable flaws: extremities and contents without blemish with firm, sound binding; fine and housed in original, price-clipped, dustjacket (now housed in protective mylar cover). Lacking the original slipcase. Near fine. Translation of: L'ordre des oiseaux. Text in English and French. When Georges Braque was preparing a series of etchings of birds to be published on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, it was learned that St.-John Perse had just completed a poem on the theme of birds. The poet agreed to permit the first publication in the limited edition L'Ordre des Oiseaux with twelve original etchings by Braque. The four reproduced in this book were inspired directly by the poem. Among his last works, these etchings mark a change from the static forms in Braque's earlier plates to a more dynamic conception. Perse on his part added to his text several pages of aesthetic meditation referring mainly to the metamorphic vision of the painter and to Braque's birds in general. Braque, who with Picasso created cubism and carried it to noble poetic heights, embodied in the four plates he created for Perse a generalized sense of power, flight, grace, and space. The poet moves in his text from a particular observation of the flight of birds to reflections on the significance of their movement through space and its impact on man's consciousness. He uses the birds of Braque by relating the process of changing form in flight to the changing form of an etching as the artist carries it through its several states. Robert Fitzgerald, poet and Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, translated St.-John Perse's Chronique and three lyric plays by Paul Valery, published in Bollingen Series. Bilingual Edition [Bollingen Series LXXXII]. …