Edge

by Claire Malroux, Marilyn Hacker (Translator)

Edge offers a selection of poems from Claire Malroux’s previous volumes, published under her nom de plume Claire Sara Roux, with new poems all translated by Marilyn Hacker. From the “Translator’s Preface”: “Claire Malroux’s poems have no political agenda. But, often enough, they subvert expectations by simply using undramatic womanly quotidian gestures to signify the human universal. A woman’s specifically female odors and textures are transmuted into the earth’s seasonal modulations: ‘the lipstick poised in the air’ in front of the bathroom mirror leads to a meditation on fixity, stagnation, and change; the silenced virgins of myth and provincial dining-rooms rise up out of their fathers’ shadows and claim the power of the word.”

90 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1996

About the author

Claire Malroux was born in Albi, southwestern France. She attended at the École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles in Paris. She was a teenager at the start of World War II, and her father was part of the French Resistance, who fought the Nazis. She is the author of a dozen collections of poems, including La Femme sans paroles (2006), Ni si lointain (2004), and Soleil de jadis: recit poeme (1998). She has also published two hybrid prose works: Traces, sillons (2009), a journal-style look at process, and Chambre avec vue sur l’éternité (2005), which traces Malroux’s literary relationship with Emily Dickinson. There are four volumes of Malroux’s poetry available in translation, by Marilyn Hacker: Daybreak: New and Selected Poems (2020), Birds and Bison (Sheep Meadow Press, 2004), A Long-Gone Sun (2001), and Edge (Wake Forest University Press, 1996). Malroux is also a French translator of American poets, notably Marilyn Hacker, Henri Cole, Wallace Stevens, and Emily Dickinson. She has won several awards for her translation work. She lives in Paris.

Reviews

[Matvey Menetrey]

Edge indeed - at their best these are poems at the edge of poetry, the edge of description and experience. Hint of someone like Celan but with the serious whimsy or playfulness of Dickinson, who Malroux has translated herself. More moved by this collection than I expected to be.