Tempest of Stars: Enitharmon Press (1992)
Tempest of Stars
Translated by Jeremy Reed
• Paperback
Description:
Drawings by David Austen
Bilingual Edition
I’m prepared to believe you still love me,
Venus. But if I hadn’t written about you,
If my house wasn’t built of my poems,
I would feel the void and fall from the roof.
from ‘The Poet at Thirty’ (‘Le Poète de Trente Ans’)
Film-maker, novelist, artist, playwright, entrepreneur, Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) regarded himself above all as a poet. No matter how diverse or prolific his creativity, he saw poetry as central to his vision of all the arts. And it was as a poet that he began his career, publishing Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance in 1919, and it was in this vocation that he published Le Requiem in 1962, shortly before his death. While Cocteau’s prose has found sympathetic translators, no substantial collection of his poetry exists in English. Drawing on poems from all stages of Cocteau’s life, Jeremy Reed has rectified this deficiency by translating a generous selection of some of Cocteau’s most durable poems.
ISBN 9781870612128