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It was with a slight feeling of apprehension that I picked up Jacques Dupin’s selected poems in translation. The portrait on the front of Dupin, by none other than Alberto Giacometti, promised sparseness, minimalism, and despair: a bleak anti-beauty; like moon dust for breakfast. And yet also on the cover, gleaming like polished teeth, stood the name Paul Auster - a writer who has appealed to me greatly, ever since his Calvinoesque New York Trilogy. I raised an eyebrow. Did Auster steal fire from here? What is this poetry he has taken the trouble to select?

Well for starters it’s hard to describe. It’s almost a mumbling kind of poetry. A poetry of impressions you can read and hear, but not always grasp. Beside obscure poems and dark poems, lie poems that flicker on and off; where meaning glitches and flashes in some kind of wounded aesthetic twilight. Some just sit there like a quite person whose company you like, saying nothing, and yet pleasing you nonetheless. Others have the awkward beauty and reticence of stones. And still others read just as well backwards. All this you suspect, the author intends: “he overwrites scribbled notes, crossings out, near effacements…inexplicably screened from the morning blaze…”. Yet something still bothers you. Something is not quite right. And then it hits you. To make friends with this poetry, you have to see through the eyes of the author. Jacques Dupin, art critic and specialist on Joan Miro, does not write poetry: he paints it.

“he writes the draft of what should have innocently written itself, and rewriting it he destroys, -destroys without effacing…a narrative?”

“why the throwback, the recoil, -with the clear prison of canvas that arouses and holds him captive…”

“Let them be written
let them reanimate, let them reactivate
a dislocating energy
and against the whiteness which challenges them, sharpens them,
against the grief on which they glut”

In lines like the above, where Dupin the critics still bites, we discover an echo of Miro: “I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music”. In reversing this philosophy, we discover in some senses a mirror to Miro, an anti Miro, or perhaps even a kind of Miro. We discover something which is attempting to be:

Écrire comme si je n’étais pas né. Les mots antérieurs: écroulés, denudes, aspires par le gouffre. Écrire sans les mots, comme se je naissais.

If you like Miro, if you like Auster who also paints with words, or feel enthralled by the idea of Dupin’s project, then this will make interesting reading.

Jacques Dupin. Selected poems. Selected by Paul Auster. Wake Forest University Press.