The Anchor’s Long Chain is an indispensable addition to Yves Bonnefoy’s oeuvre. First published in France in 2008, TheAnchor’s Long Chain enriches and consolidates earlier work, but also innovates, notably with its unprecedented sequence of ‘almost’ nineteen sonnets. These combine the strictness characteristic of the sonnet (fourteen lines, here distributed over two quatrains and two tercets) with freedom (no rhymes, varying line lengths, fragmented images). Compressed, emotionally powerful, allusive, they are also autobiographical—in glimpses. Small but monumental, fragmentary but searching for an elusive wholeness, using deceptively plain words, Bonnefoy conjures up a life’s eternal questions.
Longer, discursive poems, including the title poem’s meditation on a prehistoric stone circle and a legend about a ship, are also part of this volume, as are a number of poetic prose pieces in which Bonnefoy, like several of his great French predecessors, excels.
