New Books at La Muse

This morning, we opened the mail to find not one, but two recently published books written by former residents. Both books were worked on at La Muse.

The first is Poems: Francois Villon, translated by American poet and translator David Georgi. As David writes:

François Villon (born c. 1430) is widely recognized as one of France’s greatest lyric poets. A graduate of the Sorbonne and a chronic jailbird, he was pardoned for knifing a priest, thrown in prison for burgling a chapel, and eventually sentenced to hang. He successfully appealed the sentence and was instead banished from Paris in 1463. He was never heard from again.

Here's what Nancy Freeman Regalado, Professor of French at NYU had to say about David's translation:

Georgi’s lively, nuanced translation, accompanied by a newly-revised French text and the most comprehensive (and enjoyable!) notes of any English translation of Villon, is set to become the definitive Villon text for classroom use….Georgi makes Villon’s poems delightfully accessible to English speakers, whether students of French, teachers, scholars, or lovers of poetry.

You can buy David's wonderful translation of Villon here on Amazon.

The second is All Souls', by Canadian poet and novelist Rhea Tregebov.

All Souls is a beautiful book of poetry.

Here's one of the poems Rhea wrote at La Muse (Labastide Esparbairenque is our village):

Labastide-Esparbairenque, France

Here it is exactly: beauty and decay.
Though nothing is exact about
this town: walls as much mountain as wall,
crevices sparsely in flower. Drystone
fences marking the fields, wattle fences,
their branches laced into the grid of wire.
This place makes me think
crooked, different from the machined
thoughts of the city. Euclid was a dope.
Try to calculate the area of that irregular
field beyond the rusted railing, the garden
rough below the terrace, its order,
disorder. A pebble budges. Or
the azalea bush, spottily in bloom,
one of its bright petals shifting in a bit
of wind. The infinite perimeter of this
tuft of grass, moss on the rock below.
The distance between there and here.

Here's one of the shorter poems from the collection:

Perspective/Parallax: Son

I picked you up. I picked you
up and put you under my arm.
I tossed you in the air.
You were that small.
Nothing had hurt you.
You didn’t know hunger,
you didn’t know cold.
For a little while I kept you
from harm.

You can read a recent interview with Rhea about the book here or you can buy her collection here.

Also, Melanie Simms, an associate professor in Coventry, England and past resident, just wrote to us about her newly published book, Union Voices, published by Cornell University Press.

Melanie wrote the first part of her book at La Muse.

You can read more about her book and what she had to say about her experience at La Muse here.