One of the most dramatic periods in Char's career is his rediscovery of nature as the central resource after 1935. Surrealism had taken him into nocturnal obsession from which withdrawal was not easy, but his poetry that postdates Le marteau sans maître contains the assertion of a Mediterranean warmth and of a language deliberately renewed. He delights in the multiplicity of plants, animals, landscapes, transforms the vocabulary of his poems; at the same time he is attentive to an implicit wisdom that he seeks to convey. He becomes the fervent hunter of meanings who reinvents the myth of Orion….

In reading Char's finest nature poems we are able to gauge his artistic integrity. He composes most often with assurance, as if his work came ripely to his pen; yet he is also ready to wait long months for a single word and to revise completed writings. He is...