Plurality of Worlds of Lewis

by Jacques Roubaud, Rosmarie Waldrop (Translator)

This collection of prose and poetry elaborates on themes explored in Roubaud’s Some Thing Black, which the Times Literary Supplement called “a harrowing book . . . an elegy for our time.” As in the earlier collection, Roubaud grapples with the grief he continues to feel at the untimely death of his young wife. In parts 1 and 2, he uses the possible existence of many worlds as a means by which to transcend the trauma of this unbearable loss. (David Lewis’s book On the Plurality of Worlds provided the inspiration and title for Roubaud’s book.) These poems also rage against the limitations of poetry itself, which can only clarify the exactness of his grief, not assuage it. In part 3, Roubaud uses a mathematically precise form to explore the idea of form. As a meditation on both grief and on poetry, The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis is a memorable achievement.

Genres: Poetry, Philosophy, Literature, France

109 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 1995

About the author

Jacques Roubaud was a French poet, writer and mathematician.

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are a continuation of the elegiac exploration of the death of Roubaud’s wife Alix begun in Some Thing Black, but move beyond grief and sorrow to a kind of reacquaintance with the world. David Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds, a treatise on modal realism (the theory that there are multiple, even infinite universes and worlds) serves as the skeletal structure of the first two sections of the book; but the third section, “Circles in Meditation”, prose poems about vegetable and mineral structures, weather, clouds, cities, natural and imagined forms, reflections on the self and the lost other, this is where the real gems of the collection are found. “Cartwright Gardens: A Meditation” is one of the most exquisite pieces of writing I have encountered in a long time. Not as submersed in the immediate aftermath of the loss, the poems in this collection tend toward a more abstract language and composition and allow a more contemplative distance than those of Some Thing Black, but the two volumes taken together are a remarkable representation of the power and powerlessness of art to sustain a human being through great personal tragedy.

Lyrical

swaying line of leaves

the tops of seven English poplars in the distance

beyond the blue and green space

concede your dissolution.

unlikely that I thought, in June,

when those far tree tops and your bush, peak

of nudity, waved to me under the warm

tongues of windows filling with sun,

how brief those mornings were, and how equivocal.

I knew it, I remember, a beautiful day,

with that beauty of air that says nothing,

puts hours in our hands and vanishes.

how warm the smell of short grass, crushed

and covered

by your legs.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

why not

against my face, the angel's, the black shadow face itself,

but all the seats are taken, all the worlds

unavailable

Strange cubish stanzas, reminiscent of Crane yet glistening with loss. Mournful shadows rule this roost. Agency leaks a cry when it finds the length of the tether. There is pause when these limits are considered. Cue the pain.

Roubaud utilizes a theoretical point of departure to imagine an innumeracy of worlds, yet finds the imagination insufficient for any transport away from his grief. His own feeling disallows the possibility of abstraction. The face must be scaled.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

The death of Roubaud's wife unhinged, unmoored, and alienated him, and he's grappling with his intangible memory of her, the inescapable fact of her death, and his own continued existence in this world. Overall, a moving, if uneven, collection. I would give it somewhere between 3 and 4 stars.