Reviews
Distant
Noise
by Jean Frémon
The brevity of the poems Jean Frémon
has collected in Distant Noise is
misleading. Each line, each word almost, unleashes a set of repercussions
that echo into the distance and back into the readers mind. Like all
the
most urgent poetry, it is "fragile and momentary, but momentarily
invincible."
--John Ashbery
Sublime and compelling and like no other work
that exists today-whether
French, American or Chinese. Jean Frémon is a wholly singular
artist, a
writer who lives in the radiant zone where poetry, philosophy and story
telling meet.
--Paul Auster
Jean Frémon is certainly one of our most profoundly inventive
practitioners
of the short prose form. By means of a language somehow at once analytical
and lyrical, he probes the complex moment of enunciation itself, where
ritual and chance converge. In addition, his singular style has been
beautifully conveyed by this fine gathering of translators.
--Michael Palmer
Language taken out of body: we are listening
to the horizon, to the holding
of breath. But at the same time it returns to the body with the added
weight and urgency of the large: now we feel ourselves "pushing
the sentences through [our] bodies," and sense is "more naked,
more solitary, further away, closer."
--Rosmarie Waldrop
"...Exquisitely translated..."
--Rain Taxi