SOURCE: Caws, Mary Ann. “The Poet and the Voice.” In Yves Bonnefoy, pp. 4-20. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

In the following essay, Caws explores the major themes and images of On the Motion and Immobility of Douve and Hier régnant désert.

L'Anti-Platon (The Anti-Plato [abbreviated AP]), an odd series of nine brief prose poems published in 1947, opens with a call to human specificity, in opposition to the realm of vague Platonic Ideas. Bonnefoy will never relax his concern with the particular, and even in moments of his greatest temptation toward another land, a crossroads to another life, he maintains his visible loyalty to the here and now, to this land and the range of things which are its furnishings, seen in detail or in a wider perspective.

“And now this object: a horse's head larger than life, containing a whole town, with its streets and its ramparts...