Demarcations

Published in 1953, Demarcations (Territoires) is a volume that comes in the middle of Jean Follain's career, at the height of his poetic powers. The present translation by Kurt Heinzelman, appearing here with the original French text, is the only volume of this critical period in Follain's career to be translated in its entirety. Demarcations is a book obsessed with the implications for history of post-war worlds, the ones that become newly ��emarcated,��whether out of victory or defeat. Although the collection was published in the wake of the Second World War, the lucid yet subtle poems in Demarcations often look back to the rural and largely unautomated world of Follain's turn-of-the-century childhood ��a world forever destroyed by the century's brutal and homogenizing wars. French critics generally proclaim this to be Follain's most masterful collection, and in this stunning bilingual edition, English readers can now for the first time see why.