The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

CATHERINE POZZI

Her calves
Her hands
Her eyes
Her cheeks
Her hair
Her nose
Her throat
Her tears

the planets the wide curtain drawn and the transparent sky hidden behind the
grill—
the oil lamp and the little bells of the canaries sweet between the figs—
the bowl of milk of feathers snatched from each laugh undressing
the nude removing the weight of the weapons taken from the garden flowers

so many games deadmen hanging from the branches of the schoolyard haloed
with songs
lake the lure of blood and thistles
hollyhocks played in the dice
needles of liquid shadow and bouquet of crystal algae
open to the dance step of the moving colours
shaken in the bottom of the glass poured out
on the lilac mask dressed with rain
—mary ann caws

Catherine Pozzi 1882–1934

paris, france

P

ozzi wrote metaphysical and love poems. Inspired by sixteenth-century

Italian poets, she often expressed a desire to return to a period in which

thought and feeling were melded, before the intervention of the seven-

teenth century and what T. S. Eliot called the ‘‘dissociation of sensibility.’’ She is

often remembered more for her a√air with the poet Paul Valéry than for her own