One of the finest French poets of his generation, Emmanuel Moses presents here his first selection of poems in English translation. We see this protean writer equally at home in the aphorism and the lyric as in the narrative and the mixed sequence. We hear or overhear him in all his attitudes, from humor and irony to the most direct and disarming tenderness. This is a writer who leagues a metaphysical sensibility with a sharp awareness of singular historical moments, and who registers the undertow of mystery in each encounter with the things and people of the world.

- Kevin Hart, from Foreword

There is life and alertness in Emmanuel Moses' work; between history and travel, between the silence of a garden and the movement of love, beauty is being born.

- Adam Zagajewski

The poems in this first English language collection by Emmanuel Moses draw their immediacy from the author's experiences in childhood, one that began in Paris and ended in Jerusalem, where he emigrated with his family in 1969. His poems trace the gray hardness of pines, the pungent scent of sea water, mud underfoot on a forest path. They offer us incidents from everyday life alongside Biblical, mythological, and historical events. History, his own and that of the wider world, is alive for Emmanuel Moses, and the observations in his work are sharpened by an aching awareness of the passage of time.

The first English language collection by this young award winning poet from Paris and Jerusalem. Facing page translation--French and English.