NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Normally I prefer to have bilingual editions of translated poetry to get a feel for the original but that would have been difficult with such a full collection. Instead the publishers have chosen to offer 150 poems in English by this fascinating poet. Jacques Roubaud is known as an experimental poet, part of the Oulipo group which included Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino and Harry Matthews.

References to these writers, and particularly to Queneau and Charles Baudelaire, echo throughout the collection. Experimental styles sit comfortably with prose poems and Roubaud's particular take on the sonnet form. This may all sound elitist but it's highly readable, conjuring up the Paris of Roubaud's past as a major theme.

Present day experimental poets are still influenced by many of these ideas — the list poems of street and directory names, the prose poetry and even the contraction of separate words into one to suggest the speed of speech:

	Well whatchexpect? — it's Mona Lisa!

Roubaud's startling images are a particular delight, often catching the reader off guard to give us a fresh view of a familiar sight, like this description in SACRE-COEUR where the beautiful building is described as:

	Babybottle
	with your big tit in the shape of the cross.

	if I were fifty years younger
	they would come down tongues like as of
	fire — I would understand all dialects
	and would speak to the roses
	red roses, pink roses, white roses
	in the original tongue.

The penultimate image was also of a street. It was neither of the street I was walking down now, nor of the one I had walked in the past, which resembled the former, or not, but in any case called out to me. I knew it was the one, the one from before. Liquid street, somber; the same trees; others. But the very moment I knew I ceased knowing.

However, Roubaud's collected work is varied and most of it ages well. The sonnets may seem the most traditional in approach but they have his particular voice. The first, SONNET I, is a little like C K Williams as it spies on people about their daily business:

	A girl in love, excited, at the Main
	Post Office (Louvre) thrusts a letter in
	Her fingers tremble and her palms are sweaty
	She blushes, hurrying, anxious and troubled.
	But now my curiosity is doubled...

Roubaud experiments with the sonnet form, and one of the most enjoyable aspects of his writing is that it is always evolving and surprising us with something new. In THE PETITION AND ENFORCEMENT he writes a sonnet about a woman's death in repetitive lines reminiscent of a set prayer, dividing into two verses of four lines and two of three lines to break up the sequence of petitions:

	Erase this night invested with her Death
	Erase this dawn accomplice to her Death
	Erase this tightly locked door of her Death
	Erase this room disheveled by her Death

	Erase this eye that turned to wood in Death

	Break in upon this Death, bury this Death
	Intimidate this Death, knock down this Death
	Take this Dead woman to her lasting Death

The poems in this book are taken from Roubaud's main collections but don't include SOME THING BLACK or THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS OF LEWIS. It's a comprehensive overview of his work and a temptation to the reader to look more closely at the writers of the Oulipo group.