The Song Cave

Translated by Andrew Seguin

Highly regarded and little known, the work of French poet Jean Follain evokes a specific consciousness, with intense affection for the world around it. Born in 1903 in Canisy, a small town in Normandy, Follain watched the men and animal-powered conveyances of his rural childhood go off to the First World War, most never to return.The embers of that agrarian world were later extinguished by increasing industrialization and the Second World War. In this new volume, Follain’s poems feel timely, as the ravages of our human-centric worldview upon plants and animals mount toward irreversibility, and as war unfolds where it has so many times before.