Anne Perrier

Feu les oiseaux

« Asseyons-nous au milieu des airelles Simplement pour aimer leur dire Leur beau nom d'air qui ruisselle »

«Feu les oiseaux», which was published in 1975, shines out especially in the work of major French-Swiss poet Anne Perrier, in which the quest for an ever greater asceticism is certainly one of the most central themes. The book is composed of around sixty tercets. In each poem, Perrier sets an astonishing juxtaposition of two phenomena in motion, like in a haiku, while using images borrowed from a language of symbolism. The friction produced by these two approaches is very fertile, as though each technique were adding to the richness of the other.
An intense love for worldly existence illuminates collection as a whole, even if that love is always torn apart by absolute desire and a heightened sense of the finite nature of human life, which mingles extreme pain with the joy. Depending on their own temperament readers will be more susceptible to the wail or the song. Anne Perrier’s strength is to be able to feed one with the other to serve up every square metre of the world, down to the smallest inch, and corner that has ceased to exist, for adoration:

« Le mûrier en mourant M'a laissée son ombre Fruitée »
(The dying bramble Left me its fruity Shade)

While listening attentively to the things and the landscapes of which she is a part, Anne Perrier cleanses the her words and recycles them through the freshness of her writing, leaving them «redeemed» and ready to rejoin the «paradise of language» she dreams lies «before us».

(Françoise Delorme, transl. by Andrea Mason Willfratt)

Translation of title: Fire Birds

Payot, Lausanne 1975

ISBN: 2-601-00324-3