All but a few of the poems in this selection have appeared before, but even for those already familiar with the poetry of René Char it will look like a new book. He has chosen them mainly from eight volumes published since 1934, though he has also included the final text of one complete poem (“Lettera Amorosa”, first printed in 1953) and a sprinkling of poems from a new volume, not yet published but presumably in preparation, Retour Amont. The poems are grouped in eight sections, not by the books in which they first appeared but according to their themes and moods. M. Char's most characteristic and telling effects owe much to his careful juxtaposition of images, and the arrangement of the poems he has now chosen as representative of his best work gives the whole body of it a new freshness, a more easily comprehensible unity and a more pointed significance. But let it be said without further ado that, as an aid to understanding what that significance is, Georges Blin's introduction is disappointing. M. Char's poetry is not inaccessible. Its impact is direct and only deadened by explanation. M. Blin's essay lacks illumination and creates as many difficulties as it removes.

If you look up “CHAR, René” in Who's Who in France you will find the entry: “Carrière: toute entière consacrée à la poésie”. This is less than the whole truth. For M. Char, poetry is infinitely more than a literary form and much more than a career. It is hard to believe that he has ever managed to live by it or on it, but there is no doubt that he has always lived with it. Even during the war, as a resistance fighter, he was living a life of poetry in action. But poetry and the poem are not interchangeable terms. Poetry is the poet's inner world, possessing him as much as he possesses it, a way of life of the spirit, a personal ethic, an intimate religion with its own values and ritual. Essentially, the poet is a missionary. His conviction of the reality and validity of his own inner world and his faith, born of humility, that others have their inner world too and can therefore share in his, impel him to communicate what he can of it. The act of communication is the poem.

This conception of poetry was vaguely adumbrated by the Romantics; and if M. Char had been writing a hundred years ago he would have been a Romantic poet. In the twentieth century the stream of poetry has carved new channels for itself and the sacred river now runs through caverns hitherto measureless to man. French poets, to continue the metaphor, were the first to discover this unsuspected network of underground watercourses and to explore and extend it. The “new poetry” has spread far beyond France, but France is still its spiritual and intellectual home. It has, of course, its charlatans and parasites. It has also its dedicated exponents and authentic voices, and René Char is one of these. They use a common language, images, to record and interpret their subterranean voyages, but it is a language with many dialects. Eventually the poet has to return to the surface, and the images he uses are those he finds at the point of time and place where he regains the upper air. He may emerge under the palms of an oasis or through a manhole out of a Parisian sewer. The point where M. Char breaks surface most often is in his own familiar Provence.

More precisely, it is L'Isle-sur-Sorgue in the Vaucluse where he was born fifty-eight years ago. The first poem in the book, “Déclarer son Nom”, establishes his credentials by putting him in his own setting as a child:

J'avais dix ans. La Sorgue m'enchâssait.
Le soleil chantait les heures sur le sage cadran des eaux.

M. Char has a wide range of images. He draws them freely from the glowing but austere provençal landscape, its craggy horizons, its olive trees, its flora and fauna, its birds and reptiles, and sometimes from its curious traditional human figures. Everywhere there is the smell of much loved soil and time-honoured husbandry. The significant images are those which denote rapid movement and instant perception, the lightning flash, the loop of a swift in flight, and, recurrently, water, especially the mountain stream before it swells into a river:

L'eau est lourde à un jour de la source.

The poem cannot be bogged down by the passage of time. It consists essentially of transfixing a moment and snatching it out of time:

Si nous habitons un éclair, il est le coeur de l'éternel.

Poetry being, for M. Char, what it is, a poem can hardly be other than fragmentary. One of the great virtues of the present book is that it regroups the poems in a coherent whole so that we can see their underlying unity. Each section has a central theme. The first evokes the poet's childhood, the last is mainly about death. The sections in between are concerned with love, friendship and the comradeship of like minds. The last one is entitled L'Ecarlate, the vivid colour symbolic of poetry itself. It is a kind of art poétique, though this is basically something that can be said about the whole book. In one way or another, implicitly or explicitly, by imagery or by aphorism, all the poems add up to an unmistakably positive affirmation, a spirited as well as spiritual defence and illustration of poetry as a mystical calling, as a way of life conducive to a state of mind in which the hidden forces of creation and the common ancestry of even the most incongruous things can be perceived and, at least in part, communicated to others. His art poétique is also an art de la vie. Poetry cannot exist without love or without liberty; and both, in poetry, are eternally unassailable. Poetry is truth in its utmost simplicity, reality without the meretricious trappings of appearance:

La poésie est de toutes les eaux claires celle qui
s'attarde le moins aux reflets de ses ponts.

Poetry overcomes death:

La poésie me volera ma mort.

It is central to life itself:

La seule signature au bas de la vie blanche, c'est
la poésie qui la dessine.

It can be said the other way round: René Char lives in his poems. Commune présence, the title of the book, is also the title of an early poem first published in 1934. It is a kind of self-administered lecture on how to be a poet. It is an endearing touch, suggestive of great humanity, that the nearly sexagenarian poet should go back more than thirty years to the novice he once was for a name for so much of his life's work. Commune présence suggests also the common ground between the poet and his public. René Char's presence in his poems can be felt almost palpably, reaching out to his readers. They may not be many in this country, but they will surely be greatly rewarded.