Yves Bonnefoy

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Mary Ann Caws

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Bonnefoy's visionary place of poetry is a "vrai lieu," sacrificial and yet empty of shadow, an orangery closed off where the vacant self is determined at last by its watching and its waiting. Unsure of his victory, the poet grasps the red flame of the sword, the ardent blade of the most difficult speaking against the gray of a neutral prose; his Arthurian gesture is defined—like all poetry—by its risk. (p. 206)

In this poetry where the positive absence of all sound seems to mark the end of the path, where "un haut silence" seems to carry the highest value, the word can only be considered to lead not toward but through. In the particular resonance of each of Bonnefoy's texts against the others to form the profound clusters of images and the long strains resolved or unresolved of this intense and far-reaching poetry, we notice a passage totally unlike that found in any other poet. The parts here in their faithful belonging to the whole of the chant are also inserted as continuities in our perception, each a part of the passage to our understanding as to the poet's own. Their appartenance is also that of each reader.

As a preliminary stage on the way to reading the cheminement of this word and this silence, the simplest trace of the word "understanding" itself may guide us on the path of L'Arrière-pays behind this text. The volume by this name—a prose poem on art, understanding, and perception—examines the place where the contraries meet, ideal and yet bound to the now and the here of this land, inscribed in the present and in the poet's presence, and yet pointing beyond—showing the place, and then the moment of passage. (p. 209)

The passage from the outer to the inner country of and behind the text is revealed in the most silent of ways.

In the passage we take guided by the voices of Bonnefoy's poetry, we follow two seemingly contrary psychological directions. First, an apparent crescendo: from the part to the whole, or from the disconnected expression to the unifying word or phrase, the movement being always interior to the sense and never a question of volume. (p. 212)

The answer to be given to the question "Et toi … qui estu?" can only have been: that speech which was silence, as the song "qui s'est tu" is seen in retrospect, reflecting back on it in an echo…. But when the text falls silent, a triple closing-off is felt through these same echoes, and their echoes: "Voix, déjà tous chemins que tu suivais se ferment." For with this voice, there fails both a vision and a way of going ("vois …," "voie …"). Now the real passage will lead from the closure of this path, the failure of this sight, to the eventual opening of an inner threshold, another higher song heard or understood within the first song stilled. (p. 217)

Sarah Lawall and Mary Ann Caws, "A Style of Silence: Two Readings of Yves Bonnefoy's Poetry," in Contemporary Literature (© 1975 by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin), Vol. 16 No. 2, Spring, 1975, pp. 193-217.

In the title-work of Yves Bonnefoy's new collection of prose narratives [Rue Traversière], the rue Traversière is remembered as having led, during the poet's childhood, from the ordinary world into the wonderland of a botanical garden. The street was a perfectly named place of transition…. Readers of Bonnefoy's earlier work will at once recognize the sort of place this is: a keenly felt segment of the real world which owns up without prompting to its impermanence, its drift towards vacancy; a place which haunts him by showing absence minutely and inseparably woven into presence, flux into stability, losing into having. In a later text the narrator meets someone who has read "Rue Traversière" and found the street familiar. But this person remembers it as well-to-do, not poor, places it in a different part of town and knows nothing of the magic garden. Which of them had got things wrong? Whose street was real, whose invented? Perhaps language itself was the culprit and would allow indefinitely many possible streets to be called into actuality in the same way.

The relationship between the two texts is characteristic of the book as a whole. The telling of an experience makes its fullest sense in the retelling to which it gives rise. By superimposing narrative on narrative and by displacing the reader's attention into the region between descriptions, Bonnefoy gives the collection a precarious coherence and an exhaustiveness of sorts. But some of the material—and especially the rarefied travelogue for which he has a particular fondness—is so meagre that no amount of transitional thinking could lend it substance.

Malcolm Bowie, "The Immanent Idea," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd., 1977; reprinted from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), May 6, 1977, p. 553.

Bonnefoy may very well be the greatest living French poet. With the passing of Saint-John Perse, whom he resembles in his use of a persistent, overriding metaphor throughout a long poem, Bonnefoy has sadly few competitors. In his surreal gentle melancholy, he is like Reverdy, Desnos, Eluard, or Supervielle. In strength and bite, he is like Valéry or Beckett…. [Words in Stone/Pierre Écrite] consists of a series of poems whose extreme unity almost seems rigid. (p. 98)

Virginia Quarterly Review (copyright, 1977, by the Virginia Quarterly Review, The University of Virginia), Vol. 53, No. 3 (Summer, 1977).

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