Patches of Sunlight, or of Shadow by Philippe Jaccottet and translated by John Taylor

This is poetry from Switzerland.

Patches of Sunlight, or of Shadow by Philippe Jaccottet translated by John Taylor is published by Seagull Books. This is a Book originally written in French. This was published in 2021.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780857427915E12.

Patches of Sunlight, or of Shadow, by Philippe Jaccottet and translated by John Taylor from French, brings Switzerland French-language poetry into English through sunlight, shadow, and Jaccottet’s delicate art of tonal alternation. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for patches, light, shadow, and the way perception is rarely pure brightness or pure dark, not as a fixed lesson about a country or period. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Patches of Sunlight, or of Shadow belongs in the translated poetry library because it belongs as a careful Swiss French work of weathered attention.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.