Jacques Prévert, France's most popular poet of the 20th century, died this past spring, and there should be some memorial or festival of his work to mark not his death but his aliveness…. [He was] a man who was on a first name basis with the language of his times: his work was colloquial, as much so as Brecht's, and as deceptively simple. A marvelous three-ring circus of a theater event could be made out of his triplefold writings: his political poetry of World War II and the resistance movement; his heartbreakingly spare love poetry, with its empathy for women; and his crazy wonderful sense and nonsense for children. (pp. 25-6)

[His colleagues] were surreal, comic and beautiful, scathingly anti-church, anti-corporation, anti-hypocrisy of every order….

[Prévert was a] triply gifted writer: the passionate pacifist, the romantic and anti-romantic poet of love, and the children's Pied Piper...