'I have now given shape, though clumsily--so clumsily that, in the past, I would not have divulged them like this--to these pages begun immediately after the 21st of April, 2001, and dragged around like a burden for three years, the burden of an unsatisfactory draft, of an unfulfilled promise. Now published, despite everything, because of the impulse of friendship that they originally signified; and because of what they wanted to say and say again, before I will assuredly no longer be able to do so.'--Philippe Jaccottet Philippe Jaccottet is the prize-winning, Swiss-born French poet who, in 2014, became only the third poet (after Ren� Char and St. John Perse) to enter Gallimard's Pl�iade list while still living and working. "Truinas, April 21, 2001" is Jaccottet's meditation on his long friendship with another essential French poet, Andr� du Bouchet (1924-2001), provoked by Du Bouchet's funeral -- 'an event that evokes memories of their first meeting a half-century earlier, their literary affinities (notably their common literary admiration for the poetry of Friedrich H�lderlin), the particularly vivid perceptions of the natural surroundings of Du Bouchet's house in the south of France, and, not least, the doubts--scruples--about the very possibility of writing truly and honestly about death.' -- John Taylor