ABSTRACT
Once upon a time, American poets read French poetry in the original; or at least desired to do so, even if they could not really understand the language. The poem might describe the detours made during the journey and thus lose track of the initial goal, or evoke the narrator's hope of arriving one day, or record his or her discouraging failure to attain the thing, or suggest a "presence" hauntingly emanating from or backdropping or transcending it. Another ideal bridge-builder is the poet Georges Perros. Much of his work has a striking, consistent, original shape, and from his meditative confessions emanates a hearty, slyly rhyming colloquial tonality capable of tenderness, self-sarcasm, wry humor, and subtle literary echoes. Autobiographical in focus, Perros's verse "en langue courante" represents one of those unavoidable intersections where the various currents of postwar French poetry meet.
