Summoned

The sixteenth of the twenty-five major works of Guillevic published by Gallimard since 1942, Summoned (Requis) represents a pivotal moment in his oeuvre and reaffirms his position as an essential and compelling voice in contemporary poetry. A long poem composed of short, lapidary verse that the poet calls quanta, each in itself a miniature poem, Requis distils familiar themes and motifs of the Guillevician universe within an expanded vision encompassing the outer reaches of space. Within this poetic hurly burly at once totalising and fragmented, arboreal and rhizomatic, cadenced and discontinuous, expansive and condensed, there is a summons to bear witness to the human condition while heeding the injunction of 'notre toucher/De l'illimite' that seeks to transgress the boundaries of knowledge, to abolish the dichotomies of presence and absence, motion and stillness, word and silence.