The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

ROBERT MELANÇON

It makes another world, curled up in the womb of arachnids and flowers.
Gray eggs crack. Feather legends clash. Harvest of venom and laughter. So many
fertile murders beside an aquarium of tears. Clear pain through which one
glimpses joy.

Here is the poem brought back on the shoulders of angels. At the end of a long
path filled with incredible images. Pale as it leaves the snow mine.
Here is the word that was the ploughshare and the felling ax. Here is the
golden feather. And suddenly on the trunk a long procession of black-skinned
girls carrying seed in their arms!

Tree woven from dreams, sheets and voices, all of love at work in the bird-
chambers...
He who has sat in the grass tries not to believe in it. Hunter always, always
threatened. Eager, peering into the dark. And yet the renewed heart, ready to stop
beating.
—mark polizzotti

Robert Melançon 1947–

montreal, canada

A

poet, translator, and scholar of French Renaissance literature, Melan-

çon is also a renowned literary critic and translator. He received his

M.A. and doctorate from the University François Rabelais in Tours

and became a full professor at the University of Montreal in 1984. Melançon

possesses a great knowledge of Canadian poetry and has translated the work of

Earle Birney, one of the country’s best-known poets. In the 1970s he published a

bimonthly poetry chronicle in Le Devoir. He has done work for En toutes lettres

on Radio-Canada since 1986. From 1974 to 1982 he was associated with the

literary review Études françaises and from 1977 to 1985 with Liberté. Principal

works: Inscriptions, 1978; Peintre aveugle, 1979; Territoire, 1981; Le Dessinateur,