ABSTRACT
The French poet Jean Rivet once recounted to the author how, twenty-five years previously, he had stopped to browse at the stand of a Seine bouquiniste, picked up by chance a volume of poetry by Jean Follain, at the time unknown to him, and immediately, after reading only a few lines, knew he had come across writing destined to influence his own work profoundly. The enigmatic quality of his writing also results from intriguing descriptions of two or three independent actions occurring simultaneously. Standing on one of the highest rungs of a stepladder, a sign-painter meticulously begins a capital letter". By recording things "exactly as they are", Follain magically reveals the enigmas of our everyday world. Follain's isolating of the multivarious elements making up what, in a given moment, sense, and think, tempts one to discern in his work a theme common to many twentieth-century writers: the fracturing of modern man's consciousness, formerly unified by lo.
