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“... poetry, especially of the civilised-barbaric kind, doesn’t know how to do anything but caress. Pierre Joris quotes Celan as saying something similar in relation to ‘euphony’ in poetry, ‘which more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horrors’.The German language, like English, uses words as building blocks, but prefers to ...”

“... especially that of his mother, were to remain the core experiences of his life,’ writes Pierre Joris in a biographical note. Celan himself did forced labour. When the Russians retook the Bukovina, he went back to Czernowitz. In 1945, having anagrammatised himself to Paul Celan, he was in Bucharest, where an early version of his most celebrated ...”

“... up by wild boars. This is from a later poem in Atemwende (1967); the English translation is by Pierre Joris. WEGE IM SCHATTEN-GEBRÄCH deiner Hand. Aus der Vier-Finger-Furche wühl ich mir den versteinerten Segen PATHS IN THE SHADOW-BREAK of your hand. From the four-finger-furrow I root up the petrified blessing. If not the whole boar, at ...”

“... the main character, a young mulatta, thinks mostly about her affair with a good-looking Frenchman, Pierre Vauclain, and her disastrous marriage to another, older Frenchman, a cynic and a dog, on the Caribbean island where the novel is set. That thinking goes round in decreasing circles of desperation and allows the novel itself to think the bigger thoughts ...”