Blood & Feathers

by Jacques Prévert

Gathers a selection of the French writers poems, which make use of surrealism, puns, and literary allusions

Genres: Poetry, France

119 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Jacques Prévert est un poète et scénariste français, né le 4 février 1900 à Neuilly-sur-Seine, et mort le 11 avril 1977 à Omonville-la-Petite (Manche). Auteur d'un premier succès, le recueil de poèmes, Paroles, il devint un poète populaire grâce à son langage familier et à ses jeux sur les mots. Ses poèmes sont depuis lors célèbres dans le monde francophone et massivement appris dans les écoles françaises. Il a également écrit des scénarios pour le cinéma où il est un des artisans du réalisme poétique.

Reviews

[Jerome Berglund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificently surreal. Something like if you blended Un Chien Andalou and Petite Charm of the Bourgeoisie and added in a healthy dash of Rules of the Game, then had Brecht and Baudelaire co-write the screenplay. Delightfully schizophrenic, yet rife with the most unexpectedly incisive instances of caustic wit and observant social commentary which hit you like uppercuts following a series of expert feints. Leaves the reader seeing stars, punch drunk and satisfied. A worthy and pleasurable diversion of the sort only poetry presents, the French variety most particularly.

[Carla · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a brief collection of Jacques Prévert's poems written from the late 1940s to his death in 1977. I had learned of Prévert from reading "To Paint the Portrait of a Bird" in Alice Oswald's The Thunder Mutters which the editor and translator, Harriett Zinnes, of Blood and Feathers entitled "To Make the Portrait of a Bird." I did some other brief comparisons of translation decisions and I am concerned that Zinnes would not be my choice of translator if I were to determine which translated edition I would prefer.

Jacques Prévert considered himself a surrealist and he trafficked with many names. And some of his poems conjure up what I categorize as a surrealist aesthetic, the decadence, carnivalesque atmosphere of a Federico Fellini (one of a very few European directors I can name). The slippage of reality, the political satire, the seamy eroticism, the violence: Attempt to Describe a Dinner of Heads in Paris-France

A mother with a death's head laughing showed her daughter with an orphan's head to an old diplomat friend of the family who had made himself the head of Jack the Ripper.
It was truly deliciously charming and of such a refined taste that when the President arrived with a sumptuous head of a dove's egg there was delirium.
"It was simple, but you had to think of it," the President said unfolding his napkin, and in the midst of so much malice and simple-mindedness the guests could not contain their emotion; out of his crocodile cardboard eyes a big industrialist pours real tears of joy, a smaller one nibbles at the table, pretty women rub their breasts very gently and the admiral carried away by his enthusiasm, drinks his glass of champagne from the wrong side, munches on the stem of the glass, and his gut cuts, dies on his feet, holding on to the back of his chair, crying out: "Children first!"

It's clever, it's bold, and I find it too clever and to bold. Maybe, it's because of climate change and 'Me, Too' and Trump that it is hard for me to not read depictions of gluttony as perverse in their own right, gluttony turns on itself and makes the poem, the poem's milieu ugly as well. I just have so much I would rather do, though, than figure this all out. And I still love the "To Paint the Portrait of a Bird" and I appreciated reading "Page from a Notebook", also from Paroles, and "Signs" from Spectacle.

So ends my tortured little review.