232 Pages
©2014
Publisher: The Bitter Oleander Press
Purchase includes: PDF

Read reviews on Amazon & Goodreads

"Tappy by no means abandons the deceptively simple, vivid, arresting imagery that has always characterized her poetry: here, the front of the house that becomes a gash in the darkness, the wall of nails, the keyboard of heads, the black-petal eiderdown, and the ladder of waves. Because of the suggestiveness of such symbols and word-pictures, one senses between the lines or behind the words something much deeper than that which can be summarily designated or described: the mystery of death itself, of course, but also certain aspects of this obviously intimate yet otherwise undefined relationship, which ever remains before words and yet becomes palpable, imaginable because of the poems."—John Taylor, from his introduction

José-Flore Tappy was born in Lausanne in 1954. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, all of which are translated in this volume. She has won two prestigious Swiss literary awards: the Ramuz Prize for Errer mortelle and the Schiller Prize for Hangars and for her entire oeuvre. Tappy has also written an essay about the artist Loul Schopfer. She has translated Spanish poetry and, with Marion Graf, the poems of Anna Akhmatova. She works as an editor and scholar at the Centre de Recherches sur les Lettres Romandes at the University of Lausanne. This book represents the first appearance of her poetry in English translation.