Recumbents

Hailed as one of France’s most influential living poets, Michel Deguy has remained largely inaccessible to English-language readers. Recumbents is the first English translation of the most critically-acclaimed volume of this poet’s work. The word recumbents refers to funereal sculptures (gisants), reclining lovers, and the literal imprint of those and other figures on the page. The collection includes a poem for the dead, Procession, written by Deguy in the wake of his father’s suicide, and poems dedicated to all phases of Eros. These are interwoven with passages on rhetoric or what Deguy calls poetic reason. This bilingual edition also includes a meditation on Deguy’s work by deconstructionism’s foundational thinker, Jacques Derrida.