Emma Wagstaff’s new book is the first English-language monograph on twentieth-century poet André du Bouchet. While his work has received much specialized treatment in France, this book does the hard work of mediating — for the less-than-specialist — not only the most challenging aspects of Du Bouchet’s poetics but also the complex literary and artistic contexts within which he moved. A founding editor of the journal L’Éphémère, Du Bouchet is generally treated as an ‘Éphémère poet’ (alongside Yves Bonnefoy and Jacques Dupin), a group whose unity is typically characterized by its phenomenological embrace of the elemental world, in contrast to the poetics...