Yves Bonnefoy's poetry incorporates the risk of silence. Not silence itself, for unlike Rimbaud he continues to write, but a systematic disbelief in the efficacy of words. Words that would "name" never reach their objects, and the writer merely inflicts "ces coups sourds contre la paroi de la parole" ("dull blows on the wall of speech" …). (p. 194)

The risk is real, not hypothetical: Bonnefoy's latest poems have been published as "fragments" and "other fragments" in an apparent unwillingness to give even the impression of a deceptively finished text. The poet does continue to write, however, and it is possible that he is in fact experimenting with ways to express—perhaps resolve—this very notion of linguistic promise and inadequacy. Such a development would be consistent with the change in Bonnefoy's artistic tastes from the finished, idealistic products of the Italian Renaissance to a baroque style that, reaching out...