SOURCE: "The Burning Phoenix," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4769, August 26, 1994, pp. 9-10.

Below, Foden gives a comprehensive review of Cendrars's body of poetry.

Fighting in the First World War as a Swiss national in "la Marocaine", the original Foreign Legion, Blaise Cendrars lost an arm during the assault on the Navarin Farm in Champagne on September 28, 1915. It was his writing arm that went, "planté dans l'herbe comme une grande fleur épanouie, un lys rouge, un bras humain tout ruisselant de sang, un bras droit sectionné au-dessus du coude et dont la main encore vivant fouissait le sol des doigts comme pour y prendre racine …" (La Main coupée).

Cendrars himself never took root. Right from the start, travel was his subject and the making of him; it gave him the opportunity to "make" his own sprawling biography (itinerant poet, novelist-adventurer, "style" journalist, bohemian business schemer), sometimes in the...