Scattered about the landscape of Michaux's far-off domain are the poems, seen by most commentators not as megaliths which could supply us with clues towards the understanding of an ever-vanishing kingdom but as beautiful and sometimes monstrous totems, protected from the graffiti of passing tourists by the awfulness of their inherent magic. It is as if these poems were … strangely biased signposts pointing to nowhere and indicating nothing, or artifacts which the poet has brought into existence at the same time depriving them willfully of all significance: meaningless being. Understandable as such an uncritical attitude may be, it does not lessen the distance which separates us from a foreign universe nor does it serve the reading of Michaux's tantalizing enigmas. And it certainly does not seem to accord with the poet's own stance, unambiguously described in his most recent work and summarized by the phrase: "My first quest...