Every Minute Is First
“Gladding’s translation, visceral yet clear as glass, renders each poem as a lucid pane into a world that is eternally dissolving, eternally becoming, a world that ‘doesn’t refuse / to be broken like fresh bread.’” —MICHAEL BAZZETT
A penetrating and encompassing English-language translation from the celebrated French poet touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and—always—the body.
French literary icon Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) is known for an uncanny inhabitation of the concrete, finding whole worlds, even afterlives, in daily instances and spaces. “If I could seize a little nothing / a bit of nothing,” she muses, “all things would come to me / those that dance / in its cloth.” The tiniest moments can be acts of utterance, defiance, communion, and immortality. Yet death does indeed appear in the everyday, though it’s more than a fact of existence. It is fiction as well, small cunning stories we create so we’re not merely waiting for it: “one sets / close by / the pot of orange flowers / the here and now / to block the view.”
Here, the infinitesimal has no end; the smaller life gets, the deeper and more carefully Bancquart has us pause to notice its offerings. Though for her “the body” is the surest, most trustworthy way of knowing, the mystery of language is often referenced, and reverenced. And translator Jody Gladding, an award-winning poet herself, beautifully carries forward Bancquart’s lifetime of distinctive work. Every Minute Is First is lean, lucid yet philosophical poetry, reflecting visceral life and experiential thought, walking in the dark with a light, lighting words—or alighting on them—in their own incandescent power to make the long-lived journey meaningful.
This work received support for excellence in publication and translation from Albertine Translation, formerly French Voices, a program created by Villa Albertine.
Like this book? Sign up for occasional updates
Marie-Claire Bancquart
Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) is the author of Every Minute Is First and more than thirty other collections of poetry and several novels. In her lifetime she was the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Prix Supervielle, the Prix Max Jacob, and the Prix Robert Ganzo.
Jody Gladding
Jody Gladding is a poet and translator. She has published five full collections of poems: I entered without words, the spiders my arms, Translations from Bark Beetle, Rooms and Their Airs, and Stone Crop.
Praise and Prizes
You Might Enjoy
The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. Steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the…
Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by our most celebrated contemporary…
From the celebrated author of feeld comes a formally commanding third collection, dexterously recounting the survival of a period suffused with mourning.
The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.