Poetry. Translated from the French by Keith Waldrop. All Esther Tellermann's poetry--from the first line of her first book: "time had the slowness of not-yet-asleep"--is an ongoing hermetic journal of travels, possibly to real places, but certainly to "the mind's other country." It takes the reader on an impossible quest for meaning, for the ideal, for the elusive "central point" where we would be one with the world. The poetry is, in itself, an extraordinary answer to its own question: "how live/ in the ordinary?" "...to respond to the impeccable geometry of the world, to the too obvious richness of color, scent and sap, to respond in the haste and lucidity of the instant: I talk fast or I don't talk"--Claude Esteban.