ABSTRACT
The writings of Pierre-Albeit Jourdan, who published very little during his lifetime, are collected in two remarkable volumes, Les Sandales de paille and Le Bonjour et l'adieu. Jourdan's neo-transcendentalist vision depicts man as suffering from an ineluctable remove from Being. This distance can be bridged, the poet shows, only in transitory moments of intense illumination. Many of his aphorisms, suggesting paradoxical relationships between causality, space and time, incite us to look twice or to think obliquely. Although Jourdan worked in Paris at the Societe Mutualiste des Transports Publics, the Provencal landscapes surrounding his country home in Caromb are the characteristic settings of his meditations. Proverbial tufts of sage, thyme, savory and rosemary, but also clumps of wildflowers or less connoted herbs ("the welcoming light of fennel along the path"), are celebrated alongside countless lizards, stones and warming beams of sunlight.
