Poetry. Translated from the French by Maryann De Julio and Jane Staw. Opening Emmanuel Hocquard's "narration" A DAY IN THE STRAIT we find ourselves on stage. The book's first part is entitled "A Shadow Theater" and would seem to be an investigation of how memory theatricalized the world. Hocquard uses a day's uneventful outing as a means for considering how to perceive, how to describe, how to remember.... Hocquard's Moroccan childhood may account for the Mediterranean light that bathes his writing.... He seems haunted by bright shards of a lost coherence....T he point that Hocquard reaches at the end of his journey has always been there on the horizon of language, always just beyond touching or possessing: "While the landscape faded as night approached, this fabric in the air no longer hinted at anything but its transparency."

Author City: Paris FRA

Emmanuel Hocquard was born in 1940 and grew up in Tangiers. He is the author of over 20 books in his native French, many of which have been translated into English, including THE INVENTION OF GLASS (translated by Cole Swensen and Rod Smith, Canarium Books, 2012), CONDITIONS OF LIGHT (translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel, Fence Books/La Presse, 2010), A TEST OF SOLITUDE (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Burning Deck, 2000), CODICIL & PLAN FOR POND 4 (translated by Ray Di Palma and Juliette Valéry, The Post-Apollo Press, 1999), This Story Is Mine: Little Autobiographical Dictionary of Elegy (translated by Norma Cole, Instress, 1999), Theory of Tables (translated by Michael Palmer, o-blek editions, 1994), and Aerea in the Forests of Manhattan (translated by Lydia Davis, The Marlboro Press, 1992).