Selected Poems | Francis Ponge [Paperback]

Through translations by two major contemporary poets and a scholar intimate with the Ponge canon, this volume offers selections of mostly earlier poetry —Le parti pris des choses, Pièces, Proêmes, and Nouveau nouveau recueil—as representative of the strongest work of this modern French master.Francis Ponge (1899–1988), born in Montpellier of old Huguenot stock, spent his early childhood in Avignon. At age ten, his family moved to Normandy, and a decade later he took up his writing career in Paris where he remained almost unknown until the publication of a volume of prose poems, Le parti pris des choses, in 1942. This, and his many subsequent publications, led to a steadily growing reputation both at home and abroad. He is now recognized as one of the finest French poets of his time and, according to the novelist Julien Gracq, “one of the surest to survive.”