SOURCE: Grosholz, Emily. “The Valsaintes Poems of Yves Bonnefoy.” L'Esprit Créateur 36, no. 3 (fall 1996): 52-64.

In the following essay, Grosholz finds allusions to Bonnefoy's Valsaintes country home in his verse.

The shadow of an old house falls across the poems in Yves Bonnefoy's Pierre écrite (1965), Dans le leurre du seuil (1975) and Ce qui fut sans lumière (1987).¹ The house itself is never the topic of the poems, and is only fleetingly described in some of its details now and then. In general, the diction of Bonnefoy's poetry is quite abstract, and he pointedly excludes most references to particular places, occasions, or people. Yet the house is there, indefinite but inescapable, and at some level it must haunt the reader. Certainly it has haunted this reader, although I had been reading Bonnefoy's poetry for about a decade before the house occurred to me. When I began to discern the...