The Second Seedtime

The Second Seedtime is the second volume of notes and reflections by Philippe Jaccottet, a leading Swiss man of letters and one of the finest poets writing in Europe today. It carries on the project he began thirty years earlier in his first notebook, Seedtime. The entries are organized around things seen, things read, and things dreamed. Jaccottet gathers small flashes of beauty from the natural world, art, literature and music, along with thoughts on the human condition. Like seeds, they might later grow into poems or moments of inspiration. His close attention to everyday life brings out what is transcendent in it. He keeps coming back to certain writers: Dante, Montaigne, Góngora, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, Michaux, Hopkins, Brontë and Dickinson. Composers such as Bach, Monteverdi, Purcell and Schubert recur as well. The result is a record of one man's passionate engagement with the life of the mind, the spirit and the natural world.