Saturday, June 22, 2013

L'horizon des peupliers

Illustration by Michel Ruhlmann
This is the title in French of a short collection of poems about and written right after – I think the very same night – I definitely came back from Manchester. My parents had crossed England to come and pick me up in the north of Prestwich where I used to work as a sales assistant at Tesco's.

The Horizon of the Poplar Trees was published as supplement to one of the issues of Mauvaise graine in 1998. This collection is mainly about what I had left in France after leaving and who I had left in England after coming back. It is also about my father a lot.

Some of you know he passed away last February and you can all imagine the blow that was – it was totally unexpected despite his old age – and how hard it is still for me to recover from it.

One of the last collections being under consideration at several publishers – sorry guys but I do submit simultaneously because I cannot stand waiting for months for an answer – The Year the World Ended... Not hosts the translation in English of this collection. Besides, the whole lot was republished in issue 54 of the French poetry journal Comme en poésie.

Thank you Jean-Pierre Lesieur for giving the opportunity to these poems to live a fresh new life and to have resuscitated them from the drawer.


Saturday, June 1, 2013

Three Fresh Poems on Chicago Literati

It seems I have something with the city of Chicago. As if the city itself drew me close to it. It is the second time - as far as I know - that some of my poems are published in a media related to Chicago. There were some poems from my collection Maore (Lapwing Publications, 2013) published in The North Chicago Review late December 2012. It is now on a blog run by Abby Sheaffer - Chicago Literati - with three poems from a brand new collection I am currently working on.
These poems from The Loss (those of you who know how difficult the last few months were will understand straight what I am talking about) are "Cold Mornings", "Revisiting Tracy" (this poem relates to a previous poem, "Tracy" first published in Inclement from England Suite, the complement to Maore) and "Your Left Buttock".

More poems from this new collection in progress were recently published in A New Ulster and Futures Trading earlier this month. More to come later this year.

The poems and Abby Sheaffer's blog are here.