Black Salt: Poems

by Édouard Glissant, Betsy Wing (Translation)

Poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist Édouard Glissant, born in Martinique in 1928, is one of the most important contemporary writers in French. Black Salt collects two decades of Glissant's poetry and makes it available for the first time in English. It is a poetry that is aesthetically distinguished and historically significant, characterized by potent metaphors of local identity.
Published in France as Le Sel Noir , the volume brings together in English translation three separate poetry collections from Glissant's early years, Le Sang Rivé (Blood Riveted), Le Sel Noir (Black Salt), and Boises (Yokes). Read together, these three works embody Glissant's project to develop a Caribbean literature no longer contained by European language. He incorporates conventions of orality and ties the poems concretely to a Martiniquan experience of history and geography/geology, expressing an ongoing search for identity in a struggle between memory and forgetting. From Riveted Blood through Black Salt to Yokes , Glissant can be seen to be developing a poetic instrument that is increasingly stark and increasingly particularized as it undergoes inflections that derive from oral and Creole sources and simultaneously opens to the local landscape, the traditional culture, and the history of Martinique.
Édouard Glissant is Distinguished Professor of French, City University of New York, Graduate Center. His other books in English include Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation , and Faulkner Mississippi , forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Betsy Wing's translations include Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault , and Hélène Cixous's The Book of Promethea .

Genres: Poetry

156 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1998

About the author

Édouard Glissant was a French writer, poet, philosopher, and literary critic from Martinique. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.

Reviews

[Javier Ponce · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection really feels like the best of the best without being butchered like most anthologies. It also feels very closer to the authors poetics of the Caribbean and relation (which is great!), but still it holds on its own. Overall a great reading, I just didn't enjoy yearsayer as much as the rest.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atmospheric, crashing ocean surf, tangled beaten bodies at the edge of land and sea. The title collection most coherent to me, the overall sense of storm-tossed black Carribean experience more than any particular line or shape.

[Leslie (updates on SG) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid poetry collection for my AtW challenge: Territories (Martinique). I certainly don't catch many of the allusions, but appreciate the vigorous verses.