In the following essay, Argyros considers the complex relationship between critical interpretations of Bonnefoy's verse, his own theoretical writings, and his long poem, On the Motion and Immobility of Douve.
In the following essay, Naughton considers the notion of presence as a unifying element of Bonnefoy's poetry as well as a recurring topic of critical discussion.
In the following review, Mus provides a stylistic analysis of Dans le leurre du seuil, asserting that Bonnefoy's verse is grandiloquent and difficult for English-speaking readers.
[Yves Bonnefoy's] is a poetry that refuses to close its eyes to those experiences of loss that identify temporal existence. Death, absence, nothingness, ruin, dispersion and errancy are events that his poems uncover in the common realities of a drifting cloud, a bird's cry,… and the reflected light of a setting sun. To the myopia which keeps us from seeing and understanding the lessons of the past, this poetry gives corrective vision, reminding us that time is fatal, death ever-present ...
Place is a key concept in the work of Yves Bonnefoy. The "true place" is real yet ideal, specific yet transfigured, embedded in the world yet overflowing the limits of ordiinary perception: "Hic est locus patriae." Nonetheless, Bonnefoy's place is not simply location, a richly symbolic landscape with coordinates on both geographic and metaphysical maps. It is also an activity that takes place within poetry, and this active sense comes to define the way place itself is desc...
Death is an almost overwhelming reality in Yves Bonnefoy's poetry. In his vision of things, death undermines all happiness and all permanence. Not something we encounter at the end of life only, it is indistinguishable from the actual world around us. Pervading all things, it often causes reality to become silent and barren for us, alien in its otherness. It may seem to be the prime force in existence, to dominate our lives. But there are times when reality turns and reveals another face. Such occasi...
Yves Bonnefoy's poetry incorporates the risk of silence. Not silence itself, for unlike Rimbaud he continues to write, but a systematic disbelief in the efficacy of words. Words that would "name" never reach their objects, and the writer merely inflicts "ces coups sourds contre la paroi de la parole" ("dull blows on the wall of speech" …). (p. 194) The risk is real, not hypothetical: Bonnefoy's latest poems have been published as "fragmen...
Bonnefoy's visionary place of poetry is a "vrai lieu," sacrificial and yet empty of shadow, an orangery closed off where the vacant self is determined at last by its watching and its waiting. Unsure of his victory, the poet grasps the red flame of the sword, the ardent blade of the most difficult speaking against the gray of a neutral prose; his Arthurian gesture is defined—like all poetry—by its risk. (p. 206) In this poetry where the positive absence of all sound seems t...
[The obsessive and dominating theme of Yves Bonnefoy's writings is] the conflict between faith and reason, hope and despair, life and death, light and darkness, between "le vrai lieu" and "le désert." No writer of our time has expressed this theme in more impressive and convincing accents than Yves Bonnefoy. And it is because he refuses, like Dostoevsky, to surrender either pole of the terrible antinomy—because he feels each with equal purity and equal streng...
