Elegies by Emmanuel Hocquard - ISBN: 9781681379920
Paperback
Poet remakes the past, revealing a shared, expanding present.

$42.73

  • Paperback

    104 pages

  • Release Date

    11 February 2026

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Summary

The central works of one of France’s most renowned poets, now translated into English for the first time in a bilingual edition.

Emmanuel Hocquard’s Elegies, written over some twenty-five years, lie at the core of his oeuvre, one of the most admired in contemporary French poetry. They sound the depths of the past, finding it ever deeper, and they pose the question—To whom does the past belong? Like air and water, Hocquard suggests, the past is a commons shared by all. His

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781681379920
ISBN-10:1681379929
Author:Emmanuel Hocquard, Cole Swensen
Publisher:New York Review Books
Imprint:NYRB Poets
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:104
Release Date:11 February 2026
Weight:369g
Dimensions:178mm x 114mm
What They're Saying

Critics Review

“It is a major event to have Emmanuel Hocquard’s masterwork available to a new audience. The implicit subject of this book, like all elegy, is time and its inscrutability—to be located nowhere and everywhere at once. The capacious voice of these poems conjures a layered presence where each perception feels far away in time and yet extraordinarily intimate and direct. Cole Swensen’s brilliant translation is a tour de force and allows for all the magic to happen.” — Peter Gizzi

About The Author

Emmanuel Hocquard

Emmanuel Hocquard (1940-2019) was a French poet, editor, and translator who grew up in Tangiers. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Invention of Glass and Theory of Tables, and he has translated into French the work of writers such as Charles Renikoff, Paul Auster, Michael Palmer, and Fernando Pessoa.

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty books of poetry; a collection of hybrid poetic essays, Art in Time; and a volume of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A former Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, she also translates poetry and art criticism from the French and has won the PEN USA Award in Translation, the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award, and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize. She divides her time between France and the United States.

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