casebound
Poetry / Art
1989
48 pages
ISBN 0-88984-130-6
$16.95
Arrondissements
Daryl Hine
Daryl Hine, a Canadian poet who has travelled widely, frequently
records in his verse the quality of this travelling and the
characteristics of the places he has visited. None of these places
has he described more precisely and more poignantly than Paris,
where he lived for several years as a young
man. Arrondissements is
the most complete of his comments on the French capital.
At once a dream-promenade,
an erotic tale, and a meditation on beauty's many forms, this
brilliant suite of poems evokes a great city, quartier by
quartier, and once again demonstrates the mastery of the poet
who devised it.
`No mere tour de force, like so many of my productions, though rhymed
and metred to a fare-thee-well, this, my Desiderium Lutetiae
(or Nostalgie de la Boue) is all that remains of a much longer but
less excursive prose memoir, thank goodness unpublished, entitled
A Still Salt Pool. There, with queer but not quite queer-enough
aesthetic results, I altered not only my person but my sex, in the
manner of Henry James. More impersonal but hardly asexual, the present
dizzy and I hope dizzying verse sucks up, with all the omnivorousness of
a vacuum, the detritus of Paris by day and night, the not very naughty
and scarcely gay capital where I did my first and most arduous graduate
work, in what at the time looked like life. Of all the names of the dear
and deplorable living and dead that might have been dropped here, none
is cited, with the partial pseudonymic exception of Folly, the presiding
deity of those years between 1958 and 1962, years that always seem in
retrospect so much longer than they were at the time, when they
simply seemed a lifetime. In the place of David and Joe and Philippe
and John and Patrick and Sandy, just for starters, whirl the districts
or arrondissements of Paris, those Dantesque circles in three of
which (the third, sixth and seventh) I dwelt, while visiting and
occasionally hanging out in others. An indefatigable and indigent
pedestrian, there was a spring in my step in those days. Now the footfall
of Autumn dogs my heels, while to my case-hardened ear these impetuous
stanzas do not walk, they run. It is no accident that souvenir
has had to be imported into our language, as a memento that we have
nothing in English more fragrant than `reminder', with its discouraging
echo of `remainder', themselves both Latin memories, unless it be the
rather rueful agenbite of inwit. I wrote the following lines over
a decade ago. A tale like that implicit here is encoded in no one night,
no, nor in a thousand and one mornings. Borrowings or outright pillage
from various French poets will be too obvious to those more familiar
than I with the Biblioth[e`]que Nationale. Yet the only real and best
reason for the re-edition of Arrondissements seems to me the
pictures -- each worth a thousand words, furnished by my fellow
sojourners in the City of Light. Of these the poet and pornographer
John Glassco would be most approving of such "Pale skin books with
red-faced prefaces." '
-- Daryl Hine, Evanston, 1988
Drawing by Virgil Burnett