Books in the SB - The Swiss List series

The day after his ninety-fourth birthday, a man is sitting in a beautiful garden. It is a paradise where he often played during his childhood, and it is here that he is recording the story of his adventures with Mr Adamson.

The eponymous Old Testament hero Noah fuels his local economy with a prescient plan to build the Ark. Though no one around him seriously believes in the coming flood, everyone is more than willing to do business with him: The people of Mesopotamia had never had it so good.

A novel, in which the narrator unexpectedly finds himself back in the world of his childhood: Switzerland in the 1940s. He returns to his childhood home to find his parents frantic because their son is missing. Then, in another switch, the young boy that he was back then turns up in the present of the early 1990s, during the Gulf War.

Of the key figures from a remarkable generation of French-language poets--Anne Perrier, Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, Andre du Bouchet, Jacques Reda, and Pierre-Albert Jourdan--who have poetically scrutinized what might be called "the nature of Nature," Pierre Chappuis (b. 1930) has remained unjustly absent in English except for scattered translations in print magazines, online reviews, and two anthologies. This book rights this situation by making available a generous representative selection of his prolific output, ranging from his pioneering collections of short prose, Blind Distance (1974), and of short verse, Full Margins (1997), through his most recent book of poetry, Cuts (2014). Long celebrated in his native Switzerland, Chappuis delves into questions related to landscape, phenomenology, the essence of life, and the role of the perceiver. He writes with contagious passion, both in his poetic prose (with its sinuous style and parenthetical inserts) and in his--in contrast--succinct, skeletal, haiku-like verse whose titles, like invigorating afterthoughts, are often placed at the end. Two styles fascinate in Chappuis' oeuvre: his stream-like prose with its eddies and rapids and his poetry that captures "bits of wind."

IN

"Drawings by Heinz Egger"--Title page verso.