ABSTRACT
The Copper Canyon Press reissue of W. S. Merwin's translation of sixty-three poems by Jean Follain —Transparence of the World— deserves much more attention than it is likely to receive in the United States. The Norman poet's attentiveness to everyday life, to manual labor, to childhood as an inexhaustible fountainhead for poetry, to the strange mystery of "objects," and his odd angle on narrative subjectivity and metaphysical concerns, have made his oeuvre a necessary stopover even for poets of vastly different aesthetic persuasions. The genuineness, purity, and profoundness of Follain's quest to conjure up this at once ponderous and "transparent" world explains why it is so difficult to analyze his grammatically limpid yet semantically rich poems. Follain's poetry is ostentatious in none of its aspects. There are no erudite allusions, no syntactic acrobatics. Although his generally short poems are accompanied by a natural metrical grace, there is no stirring lyricism that makes his lines particularly memorable.
