Breccia: selected poems 1972-1986

by Pierre Joris

Breccia is an inspired grouping of poems from celebrated poet, translator, anthologist and essayist, Pierre Joris. After a limited initial publication by Station Hill/Guernica, this wonderful collection will be finally be available once again.

“[Breccia] is a showcase for poems from roughly twenty, sometimes rather fugitive, volumes, written and published during a time when Joris was living as a kind of postmodern nomad. One of the virtues of this in-gathering of work is that it makes clear the extent to which a sense of ‘nomadism’ — of being intensely in a place because one knows one has already left it — marks Joris’ poetry.... The sense of immediacy in his work is striking. But the images of weather and shifting light and shade that give so many poems their climate of feeling, always play against a complex flow of conceptual activity and the possibility, but only the possibility, of archetypal permanence…”
— Don Byrd

“…This is honest, radical work, close to the beginning of a poetic disenchanted with its own airs and graces...Pierre Joris is a wonderful poet of remarkable breadth of concern and lyric occasion.”
— Robert Kelly

“…The scope of the work is large, the thrust is synthesizing, the idiom particular and rich…”
— Jerome Rothenberg

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Pierre Joris was a Luxembourgish-American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He moved between Europe, North Africa, and the United States for fifty-five years, publishing over eighty books of poetry, essays, translations and anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows (Poems 2015–2021) and Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Microliths They Are, Little Stones (Posthumous prose, from CMP) and The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG). In 2019 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Arabia (not so) Deserta (essays on Maghrebi and Mashreqi literature and culture). His other recent books include: A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly (co-edited with P. Cockelbergh and J.Newberger, CMP, 2020); Adonis and Pierre Joris, Conversations in the Pyrenees (CMP 2018); Stations d'al-Hallaj (translated by Habib Tengour; Apic Editions, Algiers, 2018); The Book of U (poems, 2017, Editions Simoncini, Luxembourg). His translation of Egyptian poet Safaa Fathy's Revolution Goes Through Walls came out in 2018 from SplitLevel. In June 2016 the Théatre National du Luxembourg produced his play The Agony of I.B. (published by Editions PHI). His earlier publications include: An American Suite (early poems; inpatient press 2016); Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012 (Black Widow Press 2014); Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG 2014); A Voice full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly (co-edited with Peter Cockelbergh; 2014, Contra Mundum Press) and The University of California Book of North African Literature (volume 4 in the Poems for the Millennium series, coedited with Habib Tengour, 2012).
In 2011 Litteraria Pragensia, Charles University, Prague, published Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-between, edited by Peter Cockelbergh, with essays on Joris' work by, among others, Mohammed Bennis, Charles Bernstein, Nicole Brossard, Clayton Eshleman, Allen Fisher, Christine Hume, Robert Kelly, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jennifer Moxley, Jean Portante, Carrie Noland, Alice Notley, Marjorie Perloff and Nicole Peyrafitte (2011).
Other books include The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials by Paul Celan (Stanford U.P. 2011), Canto Diurno #4: The Tang Extending from the Blade, (poems, 2010), Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006 (Salt Books), Aljibar I & II (poems) and the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken, oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; Mitch Elrod, guitar; Ta'wil Productions). Further translations include Paul Celan: Selections (UC Press) and Lightduress by Paul Celan which received the 2005 PEN Poetry Translation Award. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry.