Every Minute Is First: Selected Late Poems

Description: "The first full-length English translation of this celebrated French writer of the twentieth century, a penetrating and encompassing collection of her last works touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and-always-the body"--

Brief description: Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932-2019) is the author of Every Minute Is First and more than thirty other collections of poetry and several novels. In her lifetime she was the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Prix Supervielle, the Prix Max Jacob, and the Prix Robert Ganzo. Bancquart was also president of the French arts council La Maison de la Poésie and a professor emerita of the Université Paris-Sorbonne, where she taught French literature until her retirement in 1994. She lived in Paris for most of her life with her husband, Alain Bancquart, a musician and composer.

Review Quotes: Praise for Every Minute is First

"This collection by a major French poet brings original perception and a gift for surreal detail to one of life's essential crossroads: its nearing close. Objects claim their own agency; strangeness and side-leap remind at times of Jean Valentine; small acts of witness, invention, questioning, and memory feel dropped into a well without bottom. Suffusing these poems also: an enormous tenderness toward the existence its writer knows she soon will be leaving--but not yet."--Ploughshares
"In Marie-Claire Bancquart's Every Minute Is First, endlessness goes inward. We encounter--via images of ants and leaves, lungs breathing, a bar of white soap--the infinite divisibility of time, of daily life, the transitory nature of our bones and skin. Gladding's translation, visceral yet clear as glass, renders each poem as a lucid pane into a world that is eternally dissolving, eternally becoming, a world that 'doesn't refuse / to be broken like fresh bread.' This collection brought me, again and again, to the place where eternity touches the body, a cleansed and renewed here and now, leaving me with the keen sense (and life-affirming reminder) that being able-bodied is a temporary state for all of us."--Michael Bazzett, author of The Echo Chamber and translator of The Popol Vuh

"[In Every Minute Is First, ] we instantly sense the connection between the human physical and the world around us, and it is both taut and trembling. [. . .] We don't need to know the reference to the sparkle of the Eiffel Tower for it is all left open: 'Go change.' Gladding points out Bancquart's practice and poem about living lightly. Even as we are cognizant of the poet's learning--and ours--that death isn't easy, we learn to know why every minute is indeed the first. How 'absolute / a moment!'"--Mary Ann Caws, editor of The Yale Anthology of 20th Century French Poetry