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"This book treats a constellation of French poets whose work began appearing in the 1970s: Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel Hocquard, Danielle Collobert, Anne Portugal, and Jacques Jouet. Roubaud is the most famous among the five-a giant in current French letters. He and Jouet are both part of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Oulipo, a movement well-known for using constraints in creating their work. Hocquard, who shared Roubaud's interest in Wittgenstein and photography, and Jouet's in the everyday, is known as a "literal" poet. Collobert, whom Roubaud and Hocquard admired, was a Beckett-like writer. And Anne Portugal has a baroque temperament-even kitsch, she says-while reserving great respect for the austere Hocquard and for Roubaud, expert formalist. Rather than address each of these five poets separately, Ann Smock moves among their books, drawing them into a juxtaposition that shows each to great advantage, while providing a milieu suitable for philosophical reflection-on identity, on not-being and being, on communication, and on secrets. Thinkers such as Wittgenstein and Giorgio Agamben contribute to the conversation, as do Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. Though the poems considered here are often thought difficult, Smock maintains a light touch throughout. Observing their musicality, she writes in an accessible, even pleasurable style while contributing to the scholarly study of literature at the border shared by poetry and philosophy"--
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