Beautiful collection of poems about group. Skillful use of language. Great model of what all can be done with form.

A singular reading experience. It's like reading the notes on an idea, a private document, rather than "a poem". Nonetheless, there are moments of evocation so moving, so specific to grief and the vacillations between extremes...yet done with incredible absences, blanks, holes in the language where no words could enjoin the fragments, where to speak would be garrulous dramatization. And, he grapples with this problem--speaking to an unspeakable loss--while grappling with the rest of it. This is dense literature; not because of a word count or demanding historical context, because the reader has to fill in what has been passed over in silence.

in many ways my favorite writing by mallarme

my younger sister loaned me this book.

auster, i thought, did very little to prepare the reader for the intensity of mallarmé's grief in his introduction to the text, but i liked that he placed the original french directly below his english translations, so that it was clear that he was faithful even to the original punctuation!

n  child
sister remains, who
will lead to a future
brother
— she exempt from
this grave for
father mother and son
— by her marriage.n

also, check this out.

This was my first contact with this type of poetry, and Mallarmé itself. Very deep and sad. I needed more sensibility to read those verses that gave me so much reflections around the theme of losing someone, and how the lose can be such a depressive thing in our minds.

from the sophisticated aesthete - a gut wrenching homage to his dead child

Beautiful, heartbreaking. A modern Sappho-form.

really wonderful

This is the most affecting book I have ever read.

Heartbreaking in its stutters and ellipses, notes toward a grief that resists language.

2.5/5 Maybe it’s unfair to release unfinished fragments posthumously. Maybe it’s unfair not to. I can’t decide. This one leaves you wanting more. But I’ll dig deeper on him. The shovel hit something solid.

To watch Mallarmé drown, so willingly relinquishing to the ever-rising sea of his own hot tears. The charcoal heat rolls off the waves and blows the sulphur scent of sorrow against my cheeks. I am crying too, oh Stéphane, your Mace!

Absence and silence as literally unthinkable concerns; Anatole's Tomb gesturing as close to them as language will ever allow.