New and Selected Poems

One of the most esteemed of contemporary French poets, Bonnefoy keeps his highly philosophical poetry tangible through a detailed sense of wonder at the universe, as in his famous early poem, ``Place of the Salamander'': ``How I love that which awaits the hour of its victory/ And holds its breath and clings to the ground.'' Selected from six books of poetry written over four decades, many of these translations are new; much of the work-including the 1991 collection, The Beginning and the End of the Snow-is published in English for the first time. Naughton's stimulating though academic introduction outlines Bonnefoy's movement from the abstract-as in his early explorations of a feminine symbol of mortality he called ``Douve''-to finding more rooted, joyous inspiration from the French countryside he inhabited for years. Since the 1980s, Bonnefoy's prose poems, such as Where the Arrow Falls, maintain in a more narrative form his unique, opulent alloy of natural imagery and existential questioning. The English and French versions face; translators besides the editors include Galway Kinnell and Richard Stamelman, all of whom have delivered the English with measured clarity. (Oct.)