ABSTRACT
In France, Jacques Reda's writings are passed back and forth between friends with the enthusiastic secret sharing that one associates with fan clubs. Membership requirements in this case include affection for the alexandrine, the line in which he writes nearly all his verse, and a taste for precise, sometimes speculative, sometimes tenderly ironic prose capable of countless emotional and visual effects. Originally published in French in 1977, The Ruins of Paris gathers prose poems in which blow heady gusts of personal and literary freedom. Reda overturns the stodgy, the robot-like, the overly rational, and extols the confusion; and he deftly restores a bit of structure to whatever chaos he otherwise hazards upon. Perhaps more than any other contemporary French writer, Reda represents the intersection at which the currents of postwar French literature—especially poetry—meet. Distinctly northern in sensibility, Reda catalogues rains, winds, cold temperatures and, famously, ever-shifting cloud formations.
