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jonfaith's review against another edition
4.0
For us to live with death
Death must change to light
Light change to water
And water change to memory.
The above is elemental, allegedly simple. It was difficult to appreciate the first third of this collection as I was rolling my eyes at the obvious: the ennui of the cubicle, a Baudelaire at the self-checkout.
Themes coalesced, grouped however disparate. Sartre eclipsed the Flâneur and suddenly a longing was evident, I even thought of Elizabeth Bishop. Anyone familiar with the novels will recognize the themes, though the fleeting form he uses here is disorienting, like whiff of peat smoke outside of a metro station.
Death must change to light
Light change to water
And water change to memory.
The above is elemental, allegedly simple. It was difficult to appreciate the first third of this collection as I was rolling my eyes at the obvious: the ennui of the cubicle, a Baudelaire at the self-checkout.
Themes coalesced, grouped however disparate. Sartre eclipsed the Flâneur and suddenly a longing was evident, I even thought of Elizabeth Bishop. Anyone familiar with the novels will recognize the themes, though the fleeting form he uses here is disorienting, like whiff of peat smoke outside of a metro station.
cronosmu's review against another edition
4.0
Si ya admiro a Houellebecq como narrador, como poeta lo encuentro incluso más interesante. Este hombre, en quien parece estar toda la amargura de un siglo, nos muestra también una faceta más sincera y conmovedora en sus versos, que alternan el soneto, la composición en alejandrinos, en heptasílabos con el verso libre y la prosa poética, en lo que es una muestra de su buen oficio de poeta. Cualquier lector de poesía debería, cuando menos, acercarse a la última sección de "El sentido de la lucha" (Le sens du combat).
jeeleongkoh's review against another edition
4.0
I vaguely heard of Michel Houellebecq before stumbling on his book of poems in the Labyrinth Bookshop. I did not know that he wrote poems, as well as novels. The Art of Struggle, translated by Delphine Grass and Timothy Mathews, is captivating from the first verse of the first poem:
Dawn rises, grows, settles on the city
We've come through the night and not been set free
I hear the buses and the quiet hum
Of social exchange. I'm overcome with presence.
This is an aubade, but not an aubade that I've ever heard before. The lyrical second line is sandwiched by two plain-speaking lines. The faddish term "social exchange" shares the same line as the philosophical concept of "presence."How can one be overcome with "presence," usually considered a good thing, as opposed to "absence"? The speaker has been defeated even before the day begins. The poem beginning "What we need now is an attitude of non-resistance to the world" gave me the epigraph for a new sequence of poems, "A Position of Defeat."
Like lizards we bask in the light of phenomena,
Waiting for the night;
But we will not fight,
We must not fight,
We stay for ever in a position of defeat.
In its resolute defeatism, the poetry is revolutionary. It not only indicts Western societies of the evils of capitalism and consumerism, but it also rejects the progressive optimism and piecemeal reform of liberalism. To accept the latter is to misunderstand how deep and wide the rot has set in.
An eternity package, all included,
Personalized local discoveries,
Bodies for sale in the clubs,
But no sex guaranteed for the night.
In his relentless focus on urban decay and modern ennui, Houellebecq recalls his poetic predecessor Baudelaire. He is more pessimistic than Baudelaire, however. Desire, lesbian or otherwise, no longer saves; it is dying itself, if not dead. The adventure of walking through the sleaze of Paris he has converted into the daily trudge to La Tour Gan, the nondescript office tower in La Defense, a better symbol for present-day Paris than the Eiffel Tower.
The compact quatrains of most of the poems are varied with the occasional prose poem or poem with long, languorous lines. Houellebecq has a gift for writing manifestoes. His poetry is not afraid of ideas. And one of the biggest is that there is no transcendence in life.
Dawn rises, grows, settles on the city
We've come through the night and not been set free
I hear the buses and the quiet hum
Of social exchange. I'm overcome with presence.
This is an aubade, but not an aubade that I've ever heard before. The lyrical second line is sandwiched by two plain-speaking lines. The faddish term "social exchange" shares the same line as the philosophical concept of "presence."How can one be overcome with "presence," usually considered a good thing, as opposed to "absence"? The speaker has been defeated even before the day begins. The poem beginning "What we need now is an attitude of non-resistance to the world" gave me the epigraph for a new sequence of poems, "A Position of Defeat."
Like lizards we bask in the light of phenomena,
Waiting for the night;
But we will not fight,
We must not fight,
We stay for ever in a position of defeat.
In its resolute defeatism, the poetry is revolutionary. It not only indicts Western societies of the evils of capitalism and consumerism, but it also rejects the progressive optimism and piecemeal reform of liberalism. To accept the latter is to misunderstand how deep and wide the rot has set in.
An eternity package, all included,
Personalized local discoveries,
Bodies for sale in the clubs,
But no sex guaranteed for the night.
In his relentless focus on urban decay and modern ennui, Houellebecq recalls his poetic predecessor Baudelaire. He is more pessimistic than Baudelaire, however. Desire, lesbian or otherwise, no longer saves; it is dying itself, if not dead. The adventure of walking through the sleaze of Paris he has converted into the daily trudge to La Tour Gan, the nondescript office tower in La Defense, a better symbol for present-day Paris than the Eiffel Tower.
The compact quatrains of most of the poems are varied with the occasional prose poem or poem with long, languorous lines. Houellebecq has a gift for writing manifestoes. His poetry is not afraid of ideas. And one of the biggest is that there is no transcendence in life.