A long overdue volume of Jacques Darras, celebrated French poet of place and nature, and prolific translator and scholar of American and British poetry. 'John Scotus Eriugena at Laon,' the title poem of this volume, recounts the journey of a ninth-century Irish monk to the cathedral city of Laon in the heart of Picardy to translate a recently discovered Byzantine manuscript into Latin - the first such transmission of ancient Greek thought northward into Carolingian Europe. Eriugena's pithy formulation of neo-Platonism - omnia quae sunt lumina sunt - echoes forth in Pound's Pisan Cantos as 'all things that are are lights.' This is the radiance that pulses through the theophanic nature poetry of Jacques Darras, celebrant of northern rivers, islands, seas, and bard of Picardy. His lifelong commerce with the English language as the translator of Shakespeare, Blake, Whitman, Pound, Bunting and MacDiarmid is here met by Richard Sieburth's wide-ranging and award-winning forays into French.
