Darkness Moves

An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984

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Translated by David Ball

University of California Press

Due/Published January 1994, 270 pages, cloth

ISBN 0520072316

Henri Michaux is one of the great visionary European artists of the twentieth century. Before he died in 1984, his writings had been translated from the French into more than half a dozen languages and his paintings displayed at the major art museums of Europe and the United States. He has been compared to Kafka, Swift, Beckett, Klee, and Goya, yet his work defies easy categorization. Darkness Moves is the first English-language anthology to present the full range of Michaux's talent, including many works that were previously unavailable in English. Here are selections from nearly all of the artist's major writings: his hallucinatory visions, fantastic journeys, fables, portraits of strange people's, the weirdly comic "Plume" narratives, his "exorcism-poems," and the meditative ecstatic poetry nourished by the religions of Asia. Also represented are his extremely original essays on art, literature, and life. Thirty reproductions of Michaux's paintings give a sample of his visual work, which is as singular and adventurous as his poetry. David Ball, himself a poet, brings a great sensitivity to his renderings of Michaux's remarkable French, and his introductions offer a valuable guide to the work presented. Now, for the first time, the English reader can fully explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscapes of this twentieth-century visionary.