‘Countless voices traverse us; endless, almost, as the meanders of dreams or the starry scintillations of summer nights. Only listen, and a few words rise from the murmur, referring to precise things, making allusions one would like to understand, offering opinions perhaps worth mulling over.’
With these words Yves Bonnefoy introduces his new collection Ursa Major, first published in French in 2015. This deeply moving sequence of prose poems invites us to attend to the multitudinous voices that carry on their conversations within us, to trust them ‘just as on summer nights we would lie down in the grass of the meadow, behind our houses, to go forth among the millions of stars with a feeling of falling.’
Yves Bonnefoy is one of the greatest living voices of contemporary French poetry. Ursa Major explores in profound new ways the mysteries of human consciousness. Snatches of conversations, overheard, dropped without any possible conclusion, each of these poems is pregnant with half-hidden, half-visible meaning. Limpid, punctuated with silences, the texts of Ursa Major are like stones picked up, turned over and set back down on the edge of life.
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