while reading Temblor #8 I came across a selection of Rosmarie Waldrop's tranlsations of Jacques Roubaud's Some Thing Black. about half way through the selection I had to stop, go back to the beginning, start all over again.

man, these are harrowing, mysterious, incantatory poems, I've never read anything like them, poems that just seem to get it exactly right, the "it" being death and loss, emptiness, grief. the book is about the death of Roubaud's wife.

"I'm not a necrophile, I don't desire your corpse. I don't/ know what that is. if it is. I've seen you dead. I have not seen/ you as a corpse.// Yet I desire."

I wrote Rosmarie thanking her for the translations (26 year old translations at that, Temblor #8 was published in 1988) and she very generously sent me a copy of the book, the full text, which I received earlier this morning. Thanks Rosmarie.