Earthly

Author: Jean Follain

Translator: Andrew Seguin

Publisher: The Song Cave (2025)

Highly regarded and little known, the work of French poet Jean Follain evokes a specific consciousness, with intense affection for the world around it, surveying the landscape and its species, yet intimate with the most minute particulars—the umbels of plants, an insect crawling up a boot, the woman sitting on a hearth asking “why beings and things / and not nothing.” Born in 1903 in Canisy, a small town in Normandy, Follain watched the men and animal-powered conveyances of his rural childhood go off to the First World War, most never to return. The embers of that agrarian world were later extinguished by increasing industrialization and the Second World War. “There are almost no more horses,” Follain wrote in 1960. In this new volume, Follain’s poems feel timely, as the ravages of our human-centric worldview upon plants and animals mount toward irreversibility, and as war unfolds where it has so many times before. Arranged chronologically, Earthly: Selected Poems, artfully translated by Andrew Seguin, favors work that has not previously been translated, and includes a number of prose poems from Tout Instant, making this the first volume in English to offer poems from all of Follain’s books.