The Breath of Words

Philippe Jones was born in Brussels in 1924 and was director of the Mus$ee des Beaux-Arts in Brussells and a founder-member of the European Academy of Poetry. He has published some eighteen collections of his poetry, and this is the first selection of his work to be published in English. The poems in this dual French-English collection move easily between the study of form and beauty, and the awareness of the human struggle with the actual and with language itself. The poems are in sequences and bring together disparate images in a poetry that is musical and sensual, a construction allowing space and silence, admitting ruptures, bringing together mirror effects, rhythms and pauses, gravity and grace. Metaphors of nature and of cultural and human import abound, all of them leading on to wider speculation.