Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

Coma Crossing Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

From Schism [2] Press



In France, the poetry of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte has long received the major press attention it deserves. Now, thanks to David Ball's fine translation, English readers can experience its fractured eloquence in full, from wry early sketches and experiments with prose poetry, to the stark, skeletal verse for which he is best known. Gilbert-Lecomte's adult life was spent gazing, wilfully, into the abyss. In his poetry, the voice that dominates is cold, ancient, and inhuman. It is the hum of the abyss gazing back.

Dennis Duncan, University College London, Author of Theory of the Great Game and The Oulipo and Modern Thought



While a handful of other translations of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte's poetry exist, David Ball's Coma Crossing is likely to be the one whose pages we'll be absorbed in for some time to come. Gilbert-Lecomte was one of those peripheral poets who went against the Surrealist tide to carve his own psychic path; René Daumal was one of his comrades in their effort called Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game). Now, because of Ball's expertise as a thinker and translator, we will have to pay attention to Gilbert-Lecomte at last.

Bill Zavatsky, author of Theories of Rain and Other Poems, and co-translator of Earthlight: Poems of André Breton