ABSTRACT
“Today the police / summoned me / to go to prison,” avows Alexandre Romanès (b. 1951) in Sur l’épaule de l’ange (2010): “But I also wrote two poems. / All told, it was a beautiful day.” These lines set the tone of this new collection by a French-writing Gypsy who was a close friend of Jean Genet’s, plays Baroque music on the lute, is an acrobat and a lion-tamer as well as manages, with his wife Délia, the Cirque Romanès, a troupe much beloved by French audiences.
