That there have been in the last hundred years or so a goodly number of outstanding French and francophone poets is beyond debate: Apollinaire, Perse, Breton, Éluard, Reverdy, Senghor, Michaux, Césaire, Ponge, Char, Glissant, Jaccottet, Chedid, Frénaud, Réda, Dupin, du Bouchet, Noël, Deguy, and many others such as Tellermann, Khoury-Ghata, Michel, Fourcade. The list is long and extraordinarily rich. That the work of Yves Bonnefoy stands high among them is also indisputable. Some might argue his place is indeed at the very pinnacle of such vast poetic achievement. And this for various reasons: Bonnefoy’s tireless appreciation and thinking through of the work of other poets and many artists, forming thereby a broad and richly woven poethics; the delicate, shifting, ever developing perspective and texture his own poetry deploys; his bringing into question of fundamental values of the written word in the broader context of our life’s meaning and purpose; and, in a world whose tensions, self-doubtings, forgetful pride, and dismissal of simple astonishments weigh heavily upon human existence, Bonnefoy’s capacity to see and endlessly seek to show within this same world an infinite potential for upliftment, and a mortal shareable beauty to which we may consent.Emily McLaughlin’s Yves Bonnefoy and Jean-Luc Nancy: Ontological Performance proves itself to be a fine, high-purposed study of three major poetic collections by Bonnefoy, Dans le leurre du seuil (1975), Début et fin de la neige (1991), and Les Planches courbes (2001), three collections meditated with clarity and intricacy, and a great sensitivity both to the never self-satisfied strategies of poetic articulation and the ever-preoccupying question of the relationships between word, self, and world. This critical exploration, as the book’s title suggests, unfolds in the light of Jean-Luc Nancy’s own writings on such matters and, to some extent, in the larger context of modern and contemporary thought and poetic practice.McLaughlin’s arguments are, of course, founded upon Bonnefoy’s emphasis upon the noncoincidence of the abstractions of language and our experience of “presence”; his sense of the incapacity of conceptual thought before the throbbing vitality of the real; the interlocked experience, in the here and now, of life and death, emergence and dissolution. This leads to her dwelling on what she sees as Bonnefoy’s determining sense of connection, compassion, relationship, the fundamentally shared nature of existence, rather than detached understanding, packaged meaning, closed interpretation of our being-in-the-world. An ongoing, ever-opening, generative sense of the latter is preferred. And thus, she writes, “the task of the poet [that is Bonnefoy, becomes one of] develop[ing] a properly worldy practice of performance that explores how finitude brings its very gesture of presentation into being and disperses it.” And so it becomes her own task to demonstrate not only the crucial ways such a perception of our being-in-the-world may profoundly enhance our life experience, our sense of self, of community, of shared earthly, indeed cosmic immersion, but also to what extent Bonnefoy may be said to succeed in dovetailing his sense of being, dynamic, sensuous, embodied, materialistic, mortal, ever shimmering, pulsing, with the very textual matter articulating his poetic voice.The discussion of the poetics of Dans le leurre du seuil centers very largely on the fifth of its seven suites, La Terre, where a “performative breakthrough” is held to occur via a letting go of lyrical description and intellectualization in favor of a language, vocative, cohortative, engaging the phenomena of the earth, the reader as well as the inscribing self of the poem via a rhythmic mode of address, entreaty, and command. This allows for a feeling of urgent, uncongealed exchange, of thought’s, poetic voice’s, constant emergence and exploration of its being-in-the-world. Articulation moves away from its risk of assertiveness, clear knowing, proclamation, profession, and becomes immersed in the spontaneous material flux of existence itself, a part of that flamme qui va, that endless ephemerality and expenditure at the heart, the poem suggests, of all that is. The poem’s manner, like existence’s modality, eludes propounded fixity of meaning, opting for its mouvance, a sharing of shifting, endlessly probing experience, and the mutuality this implies.If, then, we may feel, with McLaughlin, that Bonnefoy’s poetry rides on an ethical imperative, the poetry of Dans le leurre du seuil cannot be said to argue in any expostulatory fashion the nature of any “essence” underpinning it. La Terre’s open-ended dialogical mode engages us rather with the very forces that exceed language and its conceptualizing reductiveness: desire and love, relationship and partage, those “unfinishables” at the center of human beingness.The chapter devoted to Début et fin de la neige—broadly with regard to the experience of snow evoked in the opening suite and with closer textual readings of the suites titled Hopkins Forest and Le Tout, le Rien—pushes further McLaughlin’s twinned reading of the desiring-consenting, arising-falling forces at play in Bonnefoy’s ontology and his success in “performing” such forces within the framework of the poem’s own finite materiality. Snow becomes the perfect emblem of reality’s ceaseless slipping through the fingers that would seek to grasp it, exposing what Bonnefoy will term that “negativity” at the core of existence, the unsayable energy buoying up the rhythms of beingness, its materiality, and, if I may put it that way, its deeply urgent and so easily forgotten mattering. In our seeking to still and “have” being’s essence, the snow forces the hand, the mind, the senses to experience the moving finitude lying beyond all appropriation. “Negativity” thus deconstructs thought that would seize, have, keep, but does so in order to offer an affirmation of existence’s extraordinary ongoingness and a liberation from possession. The inseparability of world and self Bonnefoy senses to be at play—a play, a theater, an endless staging of beingness, we may see it as—is seen, probably rightly, by McLaughlin as postmetaphysical, post-Christian, and postphenomenological. Any transcendence at play—and both Nancy and Bonnefoy are drawn here to meditate the Noli me tangere biblical scene so often drawing the attention of great artists—thereby becomes “neither divine or Platonic, but finite and material,” that “force by which presence emerges in its singularity” in the threshold of the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial. McLaughlin offers us here some fine pages in her efforts to tease out in her joined meditation of Bonnefoy’s poems and Nancy’s dense musings the most delicate and impacting knots of a poethics experienced in a poetical performance ever “overreaching,” “spilling over,” its own limits, ever seeking to unknot itself, dis-close itself, offering a textual sense of the “spacious” way forces “material, corporeal, cerebral and linguistic coexist and interact.”This spaciousness, where the inseparable nature of being’s differences plays out as an experience of the “atomistic atmosphere” in which we dwell, ourselves intrinsic to it, offers itself, in purely poetical terms, ever as a dynamic material emergence, what Nancy calls the poem’s “mise hors-texte [comprise] comme le plus propre mouvement du texte.” An emergence based, McLaughlin insists, on the poem’s constant self-opening, its “effraction,” “diffraction” and endlessly “generative” modalities. We might say that this is the experience of the only transcendence the poem will claim, its ceaseless, lifelong renewed seeking-untouching desire and sharing emerging from what McLaughlin calls a “void or depths out of which existence continuously emerges”—tautologically, it may be said, in an unfinishable circular—or perhaps, again, atmospheric—“movement.”The third collection explored in McLaughlin’s study, Les Planches courbes, dwells principally on Bonnefoy’s sense of the deep pertinence of voice and those qualities, its murmurings, its singings, its dancing rhythms, that distinguish it in our understanding of what is and what we are from the written sign in revealing to us what Jean-Luc Nancy describes as “la résonance de l’être ou l’être comme résonance.” The chapter opts principally once more for a limited, but focused discussion of one suite, La Voix humaine. The human voice offers a resonance “qui en excède le signe,” as Bonnefoy has put it, whereas written language and its partitioning and conceptualizing tend to alienate us from the throbbing, pulsing experience of both self and other, substituting absence where livingness, laughter, feelable desire and exchange would otherwise expose us to présence. Such self-exposure such as the human voice offers plunges us immediately into that dance of emergence/dissolution which is the strangely termed “negativity” Bonnefoy deems to be “le seul bien qui soit au monde,” such good welling up from our assuming and our at once eager and consenting embrace of our mortal condition. And, as McLaughlin rightly argues, it is an experience which can offer a strange serenity “arising from recognising ourselves to be part of a resonant atomistic world.”The concluding pages of Yves Bonnefoy and Jean-Luc Nancy provide a cogent gathering of the threads of McLaughlin’s thesis. In broad terms it is a thesis perhaps argued in various of its elements by many who have devoted their study to Bonnefoy’s vast poetical and critical oeuvre; but it is a thesis brought into a more intense and yet more subtle light partly by its meditation of the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, but also by a fine-boned articulation of the central features of Bonnefoy’s poethics so many of us have wrestled with. Her conclusion, which gives especial focus to the eponymous suite of L’Heure présente, emphasizes the degree to which the world, faced with “a progressive loss of faith in a metaphysical absolute [triggering] a crisis of confidence in the value and sanctity of human life,” yet can embrace an ethics and a consciousness based upon a bold, shared, creative consenting to our “common state of finitude and exposure, our shared vulnerability.” A consent that involves letting go of conceptual partitioning of our being and doing in the world, our alienating, purely “linguistic consciousness” of ourselves, an unlamenting of “the voiding of our metaphysical ideals by the negativity of finite material existence” and a giving over of the self to its “dynamic exposure” to what Jean-Luc Nancy calls our “being-to-the-world in its very surging forth.”Bonnefoy and Nancy “both affirm the primacy of sense over linguistic consciousness,” that capacity of the mind to project itself upon the real and bathe in the self-reflection it offers. To sense, rather, the “cosmic and subatomic dynamics at work in our own bodies,” however, is an experience of a belonging and an endlessly creative and regenerative process, “tremulous and ungrounded,” but immersed in an ontic depth, “spacious, mysterious and unfathomable,” ceaselessly resonant within each being at every instant of his or her beingness. The “ontological performance” Bonnefoy’s poetry accomplishes McLaughlin terms “methexic”; it is a performance we may deem “theatrical,” participative, ritually involving, offering a sense of the unifying forces of shared material and sensuous existence, a feeling of presence’s “undefeatedness,” the “simplicity” of, as Nancy puts it, “un sens qui précède tous les sens, et qui nous précède.” Bonnefoy’s poetry becomes in this way what McLaughlin calls “nothing but an articulation of faith in this dynamic exposure” to the unnameable that resonates within us, an experience of that for which the risking of self, as Bonnefoy writes in L’Heure présente, is vital, “dans même la confiance que rien ne prouve.”This study places itself alongside others of deeply purposed meditation of the exceptional oeuvre of one of France’s greatest poets and thinkers. It will long remain a study to which critics and readers of poetry may turn with confidence for its intelligence, its sensitivity, its felt urgency. As will many others, I thank her most warmly for a fine study of depth and subtlety.