Reviewed by Daniel Barbiero
Earthly: Selected Poems
by Jean Follain
translated by Andrew Seguin
The Song Cave
ISBN-13: 979-8991298858, Oct 2025, paperback, 98 pages
During the last century, the main current of French poetry was largely identified with a certain urban modernism. It’s a current that originates with Baudelaire’s flâneur and runs through and beyond the Surrealists’ aimless wanderings around Paris in search of the marvelous. Stylistically, this urban modernist strain embodies what Robert Baker described as “the extravagant”: a subjectively colored aesthetic expressed in elaborately imagined, often incongruous imagery and obscure associations. But beneath this current there’s an undercurrent of a different kind; beneath the pavement there’s earth. It’s from this other current that the poetry of Jean Follain springs.
Follain (1903-1971) grew up in a provincial small town near St. Lo in Normandy. He studied law and eventually moved to Paris, became a corporate lawyer, and then worked as a judge in another provincial town—Charleville, the home town of Rimbaud—while still residing in Paris. He was involved in poetry early on. In the late 1920s he associated with Pierre Reverdy, André Salmon and Max Jacob, and was part of the Sagesse group; he began publishing volumes of poetry in 1933. Although he lived in Paris and traveled extensively throughout the world late in life, his poetry finds its center of gravity in a more rural France. He isn’t well-known in the Anglophone world, where little of his work has been translated into English, but this volume of poems, beautifully selected and translated by Andrew Seguin, should remedy that unfortunate situation.
Follain was a close observer of the world around him, which he expressed in language and imagery remarkable for its everdayness:
Flowers seem to be watching
huddled together in groups
along the edges of a ravine
and one can be afraid of these tufts
unsleeping in the loam
not one miller not one dray
but the one sky
of a province
where sometimes a large bowl cracks
along its painted flowers.
There’s nothing extravagant or exotic about these images or the world they’re taken from. There are just some wildflowers seen by a ravine, which find an echo in the design of a piece of tableware. Everyday sights of everyday things. The poem itself is given from a matter-of-fact third-person perspective in which the observer is seemingly absorbed whole into the observation. There isn’t an “I” that tells of seeing the flowers–they simply are presented as being there–or experiences the fear they apparently have the power to provoke; this is simply something that may occur to “one” (“l’on”). The personality here is a non-personality, signaled with the French equivalent of the impersonal English “they.” It’s as if Follain removed himself from the scene the better to let it speak for itself.
Follain’s impersonal perspective puts him, in Francis Ponge’s phrase, on the side of objects. The natural features and man-made things that fill his poems are given presences of their own, which Follain brings out with a sharp eye and an understanding of their place within the human world. He sees in objects in particular the indicia of life, as in this excerpt from an untitled prose poem:
A song comes out of each object. The artisan has sealed up inside it a bit of his body, which had known love intimately, then had lived with disease for a long time, unless it was simply done in by old age. Song of wood, of steel, of copper…
Given his keen eye and alertness to the nuances of what he depicts, it’s tempting to say of Follain what Sainte-Beuve said of Flaubert, that “he is only there to see everything, to show everything, to say everything.” Except that Follain doesn’t really show or say everything. Instead, he selects, showing and saying only what’s necessary for the setting and its inhabitants to establish themselves; from those essential details we can imagine the rest. For example, “The Present” opens with these images:
The hems of a garment on a scarecrow
are beating in the earthly wind
a glass-spiked wall is falling in on itself
From a couple of hints—the scarecrow’s clothing moving in the wind, the collapsing wall—we get a vivid picture of a field or garden and its enclosure. Both the scarecrow’s clothes, which presumably are worn-out discards good for nothing other than hanging on a crude effigy, and the wall are in states of disrepair, run down from the effects of time or neglect or both. The serving woman in “Figure of Time” is “dressed in plain fabric” (“vêtue d’étoffe unie”); the restaurant she works in is “shabby” (“pauvre”). We can imagine the whole scene of threadbare hospitality just from these two images.
The serving woman could’ve stepped out of a genre painting. In fact the attention to detail and subject matter of Follain’s poems often recall the realist paintings of workmen and peasants by a Courbet or a Millet. There is the “road mender who gathers wilted flowers”; the “Landscape With Two Laborers” “telling each other/ the secrets of working with wood”; “The Beer Drinker”; “Gleaners”; as well as blacksmiths, maids, butchers, and reapers. Follain writes of all of them with a clear-eyed sympathy tempered by a sense of the essential fragility of their world.
For there is, despite Follain’s adoption of the third-person perspective, a strongly felt subjective element in his poetry. His choices of which details to show—the objects and the conditions they’re in; the people and their activities; the times of day and their associated qualities of light—are carefully arranged to carry an affective force that more often than not creates an overall mood of crepuscularity or of understated melancholy. This sensibility, discernible as an overall attunement to the world, comes through in his anything but disinterested descriptions. He is sensitive to what he calls the “uncertainty at the root of time” (“l’inquiétude au fond du temps”); his scenes often suggest a quiet sense of loss or despair, whether from the passage of time or the deprivations of rural life. In “Green Countryside” a girl is “frail” and a man cutting nettles with bran for the chickens has “bloodshot eyes”; in “In the Morning” we encounter walkers in worn-out shirts and a vendor in rags; “The Old Fortune Teller” “is soon to die.” An entire poem is written on “Anxiety,” which Follain evokes with a twilight scene in which a sudden sound “sends a fright through the countrywoman/ who out of anxiety/ makes a bouquet/ of flowers and leaves/ then softly sings/ in memory/ of her favorite son.”
Follain reminds us that life closer to the earth isn’t necessarily an idyll. He is sympathetic but unillusioned; he doesn’t present us with a bucolic ideal but rather conveys the Sunday afternoon languors of life in the relative isolation of a provincial place—a place somewhat left behind and backward-looking, where “rats feed on poisoned wheat/ a ray of sun lights up/ the enormous pile of gazettes/ out of which comes the musty odor/ of a faded century.” At the end of “Green Countryside” we see that
At the lively crossroads
someone stops and drinks
to the deep daylight
then finds the path
that leads furthest away.
Whatever its natural attractions, life in the country can be hard. It’s a place one might in fact try to escape, as we can imagine that person at the crossroads is doing. In “Pretexts,” he is quite clear that “The pretexts for leaving/ abound.”
It may be that without the overstimulation of urban life to distract one, a certain latent existential anxiety is allowed to come to the surface. Follain seems to be saying this with “Elimination”:
Grass has grown in the deep ditch
the man walking along stares
at the stretched-out cloud
fringed like his grey suit
dogs bark at the gaping horizons
each in its own way
although everything is at peace
the daylight will decline
again it will be necessary
to cut the bread at night
sitting on the rustic chopping block
with, when all is said and done,
unthinkable death.
Follain here sees the larger cycle of life traced within the smaller cycle of daily life, of “unthinkable death” as the logical outcome of the repetition of day inevitably turning into evening and the constantly renewed need to meet the animal needs of the body. The daily routine seems endless, but in its apparent endlessness, an end is implied–as it is for everything earthly.
Follain is a poet worth discovering. This elegantly produced selection should bring him the wider readership his work merits.
About the reviewer: Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He has performed at venues throughout the Washington-Baltimore area and has collaborated regularly with artists locally and in Europe; his graphic scores have been realized by ensembles and solo artists in Europe, Asia, and the US. He writes on the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Open Doors Review, London Grip, Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, and elsewhere. As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press, appeared in 2021.