tentatives

tentatives starts in playful slip-sliding between French and English, abseiling in the fissures that open between their imperfectly aligned layers. In the presence of the work of Fernand Deligny, this territory becomes treacherous, cratered with questions about what it means to be oneself, to be a self, and just to be, within and without language.
These poems are tentatives, attempts to grasp something that remains always just beyond reach. They are a map of a series of walks, driven by this wondering, in the hills and woods that became an entire world during the most closed-down months of lockdown. They both are, and are a record of, an attempt to bridge or find a way around an abyss in language. [publisher's note]