With few exceptions, René Char's poems start out at a high pitch of intensity, which they rarely relax and in fact usually increase. Char, moreover, maintains his extremely tense, vigorous style at least as consistently in his prose poetry as he does in his verse poems. That this should be so is quite remarkable given the inherently discursive, muting tendency of prose as compared with the more paratactic possibilities of verse, hence its greater potential for dramatic, polarized juxtaposition. Because of the tension that obtains between the eruptive texture of his poems and the smooth prose vehicle that he often elects to use, Char seems both more impressive and more authentically himself as a prose poet than as a poet in verse. In either form, however, his unfailing capacity to energize to the utmost degree the individual words and phrases of what are in the end thoroughly organized...