Black Mirror

Born in 1907 and dead by 1943, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte was a French poet tied to the Surrealist moment. This bilingual volume brings his work into English for the first time. Its poems are strange, mocking, and at times deliberately shocking. Together with René Daumal, he started the review and movement called Le Grand Jeu, which he described as the impersonal instant of eternity within emptiness.

The translator and poet David Rattray, known for his versions of Antonin Artaud, supplies an introduction. He explains that the sense of eternity glimpsed in the void pushed Daumal toward Hinduism, Yoga philosophy, and Sanskrit, while it led Gilbert-Lecomte to pursue what he called a metaphysics of absence. Rattray's translations aim to keep the force and originality of the original French verse.

Readers interested in French Surrealism, experimental poetry, or the search for meaning in absence will find the collection a direct entry point into a poet who has rarely been read in English.