The Collected Poems of Édouard Glissant

This volume collects and translates--most for the first time--the nine volumes of poetry published by Edouard Glissant, a poet, novelist, and critic increasingly recognized as one of the great writers of the twentieth century. The poems bring to life what Glissant calls "an archipelago-like reality," partaking of the exchanges between Europe and its former colonies, between humans and their geographies, between the poet and the natural world. Reciting and re-creating histories of the African diaspora, Columbus's "discovery" of the New World, the slave trade, and the West Indies, Glissant underscores the role of poetic language in changing both past and present irrevocably. As translator Jeff Humphries writes in his introduction, Glissant's poetry embraces the aesthetic creed of the French symbolists Mallarme and Rimbaud ("The poet must make himself into a seer") and aims at nothing less than a hallucinatory experience of imagination in which the differences among poem, reader, and subject dissolve into one immediate present.