Alain-Fournier’s poems, while relatively few, are one of the small pearls washed up in the maelstrom of early twentieth-century France. Best known for his novel Le Grand Meaulnes, a posthumous classic, Alain-Fournier was killed in battle in 1914. His poems suspend a pre-war French idyll of warm evenings and rained-on orchards, silk-banded straw hats, lamp-lit farmhouses – and young love reaching out ‘in the frightening dark, with timid fingers’. His lines fluoresce with the pain of memories which cannot be re-lived, and they combine elements of Symbolism, Impressionism and Imagism. The sun is an ambivalent force in these poetic narratives, which transform themselves as if they were dreams. The music of Debussy, the writings of Laforgue, and the paintings of Renoir can also be detected under the surface of Alain-Fournier’s verse, which is provided here in a comprehensive English translation for the first time.

'The atmospherics of night and rain do not suggest a desolating personal loss in the area either of love or money; they have a quality of the magical and evoke unmistakably the enchanted world of Pellaas et Mllisande.'
D. M De Silva, Poetry Salzburg

'There is an attractive insouciance in the proceeding, a freshness and vitality in the result, and a breath of romantic yearning (Sehnsucht) and the whole, which are characteristic of the poet and make up a large part of the enchantment of his youthful world.'
D.M De Silva, Poetry Salzburg

'Anyone who has read his novel will be curious about Fournier's poems, and fortunately, Carcanet offers them in a bilingual edition. '
Frank Beck, The Manhattan Review

Alain-Fournier was the pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier, a French author and soldier. He was the author of a single novel, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), which has been twice filmed and is considered a classic of French literature. In 1914, Alain-Fournier started work on a second novel, Colombe Blanchet, but this remained unfinished when he joined the Army as a lieutenant in August. He died fighting near Vaux-les-Palameix (Meuse) one month later, on 22 September 1914. His body remained unidentified until 1991, at which time he was interred in the cemetery of Saint-Remy-la-Calonne. Most of the writing of Alain-Fournier was published posthumously: Miracles (a volume of poems and essays) in 1924, his correspondence with Jacques Riviere in 1926 and his letters to his family in 1930. His notes and sketches for Colombe Blanchet have also been published. Anthony Howell was born in 1945. A former dancer with the Royal Ballet and subsequently a performance artist – he founded the Theatre of Mistakes 1974 – he has always been as active in literature as he has in movement. He has published several collections of poems and two novels. During 2002–7 he taught creative writing in prisons. He lives in London. Anthony Costello is a writer and poetry event organiser. His first poetry collection, The Mask, was published by Lapwing Publications in 2014. His second, Angles & Visions, (High Window Press) was published in 2016. He is currently working on a non-fiction book about Artists and their Physicians. Anthony is co-editor and associate publisher at The High Window Press. Anita Marsh studied English & French at Southampton university. She worked as a language assistant in Belgium, a translator for BNP Paribas, and a senior bookseller in London. Anita had a lifelong love of the French language and French Literature and spent the last year of her life living in France translating the poems of Alain-Fournier.