Seamarks

The work of Saint-John Perse, the pen-name of the exiled French diplomat Alexis Leger, is unlike that of any other 20th-century poet. Though Perse maintains hints of the French poetic tradition, his verse consists of long sentences as if prose poems, repeated ecstatic invocations, and settings in some ancient civilization that could be Ur or Athens. His massive 1957 work AMERS ("Seamarks") is his epic masterpiece, two hundred pages of thrilling poetry in honour of the Sea. The poem starts off with an Invocation that establishes the setting as that universal civilization common to Perse's work: "Et vous, Mers, qui lisiez dans de plus vastes songes, nous laisserez-vous un soir aux rostres de la Ville, parmi la pierre publique et la pampres de bronze?" With this classical ambience established, Perse then announces that his poem will even follow the structural conventions of a choral ode, with a Stophe and Choir: "Poese pour accompagner la marche d'une recitation en l'honneur de la Mer. / Poesie pour assister le chant d'une marche au pourtour de la Mer. / Come l'entreprise du tour d'autel et la gravitation du choeur" What follows is beautiful poetry, all the more remarkable for the fact that its lack of "plot" poses no problem. AMERS is, in my opinion, Perse's best poem. However, its great length can be intimidating, and his earlier poem "Exil" works as a better introduction. The reader with limited French may want to start with the New Directions paperback Selected Poems, where alongside the original French the poetry has been translated into English by a number of distinguished literary figures. The volume is rounded off with two other writings. OISEAUX is a series of thirteen one-page poems about the majesty birds, originally written to accompany paintings by Georges Braque. Though usually considered a minor work, it is quite thought-provoking. POESIE is the speech Perse gave on 10 December 1960 when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. It has become notorious among Nobel speeches for the way the intensively private man deflects attention away from himself towards poetry. My major complaint is that the paper of this old Gallimard paperback is of low quality. Indeed, you're unlikely to find a copy of this today in which the paper is not brittle and yellow. If you have already come to like Perse's poetry, you might as well invest in the volume of collected poems and correspondence published by Gallimard in the series Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, which is expensive but ultimately much cheaper than assembling separate publications. Nonetheless, if you come across this book with AMERS and the two other works for cheap, it can be worth picking up while you save your pennies for the collected works.