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GUY GOFFETTE is one of the most unabashedly lyrical contemporary French poets, a man from northern France (born in the Ardennes in 1946) who claims Verlaine, issued from the same geography, as one of his literary godfathers with no compunction. Goffette makes frequent homage to his sources, however oblique, in an ongoing series of ‘Dilectures’ - doubled readings/readings of predilection and delectation: deft verse portraits of writers as diverse as Auden, Ritsos, Borges, Max Jacob, Valéry Larbaud, Pound, Pavese, Rimbaud, and, of course, Verlaine, to whom he also devoted a prose book, neither biography nor criticism but a poet’s re-imagination of another poet’s life and mind. He has written a similar volume on Bonnard (some of his verse homages are to visual
artists as well). Auden, that least French of poets, has fascinated Guy Goffette for years, and his latest , just-published book, L’Oeil de la baleine, confronts him in a similarly idiosyncratic prose encounter.

   Despite these homages and acknowledgements of origins, Goffette’s is not at all a ‘literary’, referential, even less a self-referential poetry. Rather, he is a poet who makes use (as Paul Claudel stated in his own ars poetica) of quotidian words, everyday expressions, and makes them new, re-invests them with humour, connotation and emotion, and with a tragicomic festivity. He is also a poet whose work, in subtext, dialogues with the past of French poetry itself, though this dialogue is an undercurrent, never diverting the poem from its primary direction. The witty ‘Charlestown Blues’,*  for example, written during a residence in Rimbaud’s Charleville, makes use of the decasyllabic dixain, which a French reader would first associate, not with the Verlaine/Rimbaud duo/duel but with Maurice Scève’s mysterious ‘Délie’, published in Lyon in 1544.

   As part of this dialogue, Guy Goffette’s ludic tug-of-war with the sonnet, which is evident in his three most recent books, is one thing that drew me to his work , as a poet who, myself, have often handled, de- and re-constructed the form. Goffette has written wry, contemporary rhymed sonnets in alexandrines. But a thirteen-line poem, as part of a sequence or standing on its own, made up of three usually unrhymed quatrains and a last line which sometimes, though not always, mounts to the classic 12 syllables, has become Goffette’s ‘signature’ strophe since his 1991 collection La Vie promise, and he has continued to use it in his two subsequent books.

‘The Construction Site of the Elegy’ (‘le Chantier de l’Elégie’), while
not a sonnet sequence, reveals Goffette’s techniques and preoccupation: for example, the juxtaposition of a quotidian situation and a philosophical preoccupation; the site of the pastoral made contemporary in its details; the use of prolonged metaphor and simile, which - the musician,  the ‘Bateau Ivre’ children - move to the forefront of the poem like contrapuntal protagonists; the themes of eros and thanatos, or rather, the erotic shadowed by the awareness of death; the ludic syntax, here manifest in a parenthetical statement which straddles sections two through five.

   Guy Goffette lived in northern France for many years, and worked as a bookseller and as a schoolteacher. His austere and prematurely ruptured childhood is eloquently invoked in a book of prose memoirs, Partance et autres lieux, published in 2000. He has travelled widely, both near - Belgium and the Netherlands - and far, to Eastern Europe and to Louisiana, on the trail of the blues. Like his friend and mentor, the poet Jacques Réda, he is a jazz enthusiast. He now lives in central Paris, where he works as an editor at Gallimard, and is closely but informally allied with poet-friends of his own generation such as Hédi Kaddour and Paul de Roux, with whose
work he also readily dialogues in the context of poems.

   After a period in which much of French poetry eschewed the concrete, the narrative and the quotidian, Guy Goffette’s poems have found an enthusiastic readership in the last two decades. He received the Grand Prix de Poésie of the Société des gens de lettres in 2000 for the entirety of his work. His early book, Éloge pour une cuisine de province, along with La vie promise, were re-issued in Gallimard’s pocket-format Poésie series in 2000, and his latest collection, Un manteau de fortune, was awarded the Grand Prix de Poésie of the Académie française for 2001.