The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

Exquisite translations by A. Poulin. A lovely bilingual edition with Poulin's enlightening introduction.

This book contains very different work from Rilke's German poetry, decidedly French in nature, with ephemeral images and nuanced depictions of the poetic scenes of life. Many of the poems also are constructed with an amazing sense of the meter and scan of the French language and with an extremely precise rhyme of French vowels. The reader of this edition will see an entirely different side to Rilke.

I first read this book when I was eighteen years old, a starving Bohemian (more or less), and at a crossroads in my life.Years later, I still turn to it, and it sits on my bookshelf, in front of me as I write this review. If you thought you knew roses before - you may find out, after reading Rilke's French poetry - that you haven't known roses at all. One poem in particular that has followed me through the years has the words: "By sheer dint of prayer, I knew bread."By sheer dint of this book of verse, you may know roses.