and very readable presentation of material that could easily have been rendered tedious. University of Arkansas Hope Christiansen LANCASTER, ROSEMARY. Poetic Illuminations: René Char and his Artist Allies. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. ISBN 978-90-420-3207-1. Pp. 252. 50 a. Lancaster’s book covers half a century of Char’s collaboration with his alliés substantiels, as he called them in Recherche de la base et du sommet. These close partnerships began during his Surrealist period—Dalí made the frontispiece for Artine (1930) and Kandinsky the one for Le marteau sans maître (1934)—and continued unabated through his last years, when he published Les voisinages de Van Gogh (1985) and worked with Alexandre Galperine to produce an illuminated selection of poems, Le gisant mis en lumière (1987). Lancaster devoted prior attention to the poet’s art writing, in a chapter of La poésie éclatée de René Char (1994, FR 70.1). In this new study, however, she delves systematically into the broad chronological range of Char’s interactions with numerous artists. Lancaster’s first chapter depicts Char’s entryways into the world of artists’/ poets’ books, concentrating on his prewar collaboration with Christian and Yvonne Zervos of the review Cahiers d’art, where Char published his ekphrastic poems, “Une Italienne de Corot” and “Courbet: Les casseurs de pierre.” Other chapters focus on the poet’s interrelationship with Picasso, Braque, Miró, Georges de La Tour, the Lascaux murals, Nicolas de Staël, Vieira da Silva, and Van Gogh and Galperine. An epilogue discusses three portraits of Char by exile Victor Brauner. The primary art works that Lancaster analyzes are included in color reproductions. Lancaster underscores the shared ethical and creative values that connected Char to individual members of this select artistic community from 1930 to 1988, but from each of these encounters she also draws a set of formal analogies that explains the attraction between poet’s text and artist’s illumination. To cite a few of the examples, Lancaster uses Char’s two homages to Picasso, “Mille planches de salut” (1939) and “Sous les vents étésiens” (1973), to trace the poet’s evolution from the verge of “political readiness” for World War II, toward greater postwar emphasis on the “restorative value of poetry to mankind in a world of fragile harmonies ” (70–71). In discussing Miró, a suggestive comparison is made between the painter’s Constellations (a series of gouaches, 1940–41), and Char’s Orion sequence , Aromates chasseurs (1975). Chapter seven, which treats Char and Nicolas de Staël, contains perceptive remarks on the Abominable Snowman or “Yeti motif” (167), which first appeared as images like footprints in the snow, in the artist’s woodcuts for Char’s Poèmes (1951). The poet’s last collection, Éloge d’une soupçonnée, offered a final reworking of the Yeti motif, thirty-three years after the artist’s enigmatic death: “Char imaginatively returns [de Staël] to the rest he believed he deserved,” no longer on snow but “on a path softened [...] by dust or the cottony flock of wayside flowers” (176). In chapter eight, Lancaster argues that Vieira da Silva’s “lapidary work, typically executed in sharply intersecting lines, densely patterned webs of color, and seemingly imploding rectangles, diamonds and squares” most closely approaches Char’s “taut, spare lyricism and explosively compressed style” (178). The final chapter explores Char’s fascination 188 FRENCH REVIEW 86.1 with Van Gogh’s last years. “Sometimes, it is the sheer absorption of the self in vast surroundings that inspires” poet and painter alike (210), yet the “sense of the infinite that pervades Char’s and Van Gogh’s last works increasingly conveys a foreboding that time is running out” (214). Mortality dominates Char’s work with Galperine, Le gisant mis en lumière. The artist’s opening image depicts a “tomblike rectangle” that is “repeatedly performed” throughout the book (220). Lancaster richly studies the shifting emphases of Char’s art writing as the poet moved through Surrealism, Resistance, and into his long postwar era, marked increasingly by images of fragility and by his tenacious defense of ideas and things that modern society endangers, including poetry itself...