Can love poetry be the site of a creative partnership? When a poem is written by the male poet for the woman he loves, both addressed to her and taking her as its object, how does – how can – she interact with it?
This book represents a foray into the love poetry of Jacques Roubaud, tracing a lifetime of writing from the ardour of first love to the pain of grief and loss. The author brings Roubaud’s poetry into proximity with evolving views on the sexual relation from Freud, Lacan and Irigaray in readings that consider the ties between poet and lover, poet and reader. At the centre of it all is the poet’s engagement with form: the free verse style of the Surrealists that was popular in his youth, the form-orientated writing he turns to as a response to his self-doubt as a writer, and the collapse of metre and rhythm when he mourns the death of his wife. Is form a device for the confinement of the feminine presence in his poems, or does Roubaud construct spaces in his poetry for his lover – his other – to be?