The Selected Poems of Jean Senac

"The poems of Jean Senac sing in a long, sustained and pure voice of the land where the sun has its workshop---a workshop whose roof is the night and for whom man is a disappointing and marvelous achievement."---Rene Char

"From our first immersion in Senac's poetry of excess (for even this continent selection, so equably sieved and so legitimately translated, is excessive, immoderate, furiously plethoric); from the initial infraction of this rapturous aspersion-by-words...we emerge dazed from these depths, we surface choking and gagging on the inexorable inundation of the wrong language: always French, French striving and straining to do the work of Arabic, so that the very justice of an equally inapplicable English deceives the outrage of the gorgeous occidental syllables. And we gasp the `intense breath' this incompatibly francophone Algerian poet could never draw for his country..."---from the preface by Richard Howard

"After Senac's death in September 1973, the Moroccan author, Tahar Ben Jel-loun, who had met Senac in his youth, wrote: `I think of his furor, his cries, his refusals: because the Arab world that he loved has forgotten, in a particularly harsh way, what it knew of freedom and poetry, only to replace them with falsehoods backed up with arms and the gloved hand placed over the mouths of those who attempt to speak.' Senac, the gaouri, left behind a vast body of work, in which he elaborated his vision for what he hoped could be the reconciliation between European and Islamic culture, and for an Algeria that aspired to openness and plurality."---from the introduction by Katia Sainson

JEAN SENAC (1926-1973) is an Algerian poet who wrote love poems and militant poems on the fight for Algerian independence in French.