Georges L Godeau

We'll See (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) Georges L Godeau

Poetry. Translated from the French by Kathleen McGookey. WE'LL SEE, originally published in France in 1995 as On verra bien by le dé bleu, is Georges L. Godeau's first book translated into English. This is a collection of ninety brief prose poems, most of which focus on ordinary people and events. Godeau's prose poems are disarmingly and deceptively simple, yet resonate with each other. Godeau has said, "A poem should not last longer than its emotion." Still, his prose poems capture, almost photographically, moments of everyday life. Jacques Reda has said that Godeau's poetry is poetry of "what happens when nothing happens." In his account of a day spent with Godeau, Xavier Person observed that his poems were a lot like his modest house in Magné, France?a little cold, excessively clean, very tidy, and without a lot of furniture?poems that contained only the most straightforward and impassioned elements.

"In Georges Godeau's WE'LL SEE, the ordinary, quotidian details of everyday life reveal the miraculous lurking there, and each poem becomes a window on the absolute. These poems are quiet, efficient, but unsettling in their deep resonances. Although little happens in Godeau's poems, each is filled with lucent, telling particulars. His poems, so calm on the surface, accrue enormous power. Like frames in a movie, each poem appears almost static, but in congress, they span immense psychic and spiritual geographies. Godeau exposes a world in which the marvelous is all around us, a world in which 'Providence has blue eyes.' Godeau's terse prose poems are the perfect vehicle for his modest, unassuming voice, and Kathleen McGookey has rendered Godeau's laconic utterances in colloquial American English that is true to the original, and absolutely convincing in translation."?Gary Young