ABSTRACT
While growing up in Penarth, a seaside town near Cardiff, Wales, Heather Dohollau could hardly imagine that she would settle in France in 1951 and by the mid-1960s be writing some very beautiful poetry—in French. She also admires the writer Rene Daumal's contrasting image of poetry struggling "up the slope". "Like a trout", specifies Daumal, poetry "goes upstream to give birth at the vital source". Whatever the language, Dohollau ceaselessly treks toward this vital source. She envisions this fountainhead as being necessarily "remote" and of arduous approach. Similarly crucial to an appreciation of her poetry, which is distinguished by gentle meters and grammatical limpidity, is her idea of finding the "true distance", as she puts it in her most recent collection, Le Point de rosee (1999). In "Sant Ippolito", a series of short poems inspired by one of her many trips abroad, she muses pointedly: "Sometimes / When nothing happens / It seems / That this nothing / Is everything".
