The Figure Outward

Author: Jean Daive

Translator: Kevin Holden

Publisher: Black Square Editions (2025)

A major work by one of France’s great poets, The Figure Outward (L’énonciateur des extrêmes) consists of one unfolding, translucent poem, both minimal and capacious, that devotes itself to a rigorous examination of both ancient and modern worlds. Known for his close connection to the poets and poetics of Objectivism, here Jean Daive engages rather with the voices of Black Mountain, extending a conversation between Charles Olson and Robert Creeley—whose work and whose correspondence function almost as characters within Daive’s poem—an exchange that began in Mayan Letters and continued across the span of their friendship. Ranging in tone and reference, fracturing and recombining along axes of intricate attention and personal obligation, Daive’s book is “set” in Mesoamerica, where it encounters conflicts and harmonies between sustenance, desire, and ritual, the origins of writing, the origins of money, and the ecosystems of both animal and cultural worlds. At once an archeology of deep time and in dialogue with the contemporary concerns of experimental American and French poetics, The Figure Outward also seeks to create a futurity: a new site and a new syntax for the particularities of perception, for empathy, friendship, and ethics, and for the cognition of history in its multiplicity. Elusive and lucid, primordial and precise, the book startles the reader with its innovation and sparkles in its intelligence, dedication, and sweep.