Pierre Chappuis

The Swiss poet, Pierre Chappuis, and his translator, John Taylor - a native Iowan and an accomplished a poet in his own right - combine to create a dual narrative of time and place. The differences are obvious - Iowa and Switzerland are half a world apart in more ways than one - but the similarities are often surprising. The result is, as the University of Chester's Ian Seed observes, 'a reading experience like no other.'Pierre Chappuis lives in Neuch tel where he has long taught. John Taylor is a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review and lives in Angers.

One of the central figures from a remarkable generation of French-language poets, Pierre Chappuis has thus far only been represented in English translation in fragments: a few poems here and there in magazines, online reviews, and anthologies. Like Bits of Wind rights that wrong, offering a generous selection of Chappuis’s poetry and prose from the past forty years, drawn from several of his books. In these pages, Chappuis delves into long-standing questions of the essence of life, our relationship to landscape, the role of the perceiving self, and much more. His skeletal, haiku-like verse starkly contrasts with his more overtly poetic prose, which revels in sinuous lines and interpolated parentheticals. Together, the different forms are invigorating and exciting, the perfect introduction for English-language readers.