The year in poetry 2015: Beyond tradition and innovation

This article acknowledges the persistence of a tension between tradition and innovation in contemporary French poetry but the author argues that many 2015 books of French-language poetry feature a combination of tradition and innovation. A preoccupation with silence and absence and an awareness of the strangeness of language recur in many 2015 collections of French and Francophone poems. Essays in poetics by Frank Smith and Jean-Christophe …