The Anchor's Long Chain

"The Anchor" "s Long Chain" is an indispensable addition to Yves Bonnefoy s "oeuvre." First published in France in 2008, "The""Anchor" "s Long Chain" enriches and consolidates earlier work, but also innovates, notably with its unprecedented sequence of almost nineteen sonnets. These combine the strictness characteristic of the sonnet (fourteen lines, here distributed over two quatrains and two tercets) with freedom (no rhymes, varying line lengths, fragmented images). Compressed, emotionally powerful, allusive, they are also autobiographical in glimpses. Small but monumental, fragmentary but searching for an elusive wholeness, using deceptively plain words, Bonnefoy conjures up a life s eternal questions.
Longer, discursive poems, including the title poem s meditation on a prehistoric stone circle and a legend about a ship, are also part of this volume, as are a number of poetic prose pieces in which Bonnefoy, like several of his great French predecessors, excels.
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Yves Bonnefoy is a poet, critic, and professor emeritus of comparative poetics at the Collège de France. In addition to poetry and literary criticism, he has published numerous works of art history and translated into French several of Shakespeare's plays. Beverley Bie Brahic is an award-winning poet and translator. A Canadian, she lives in Paris and Stanford, California.