The Day's Ration: Selected Poems
by Gilles Ortlieb
Translated by Patrick McGuinness & Stephen Romer
Introduced by Sean O'Brien
WINNER of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation
(Patrick McGuinness and Stephen Romer).
For Gilles Ortlieb, the day’s ration is hard won. He
takes the art of noticing to a new level, petrifying us
with moments of bleakness and ushering us out of them
through his humanity. He states things as they are, with
exactitude, with authenticity, and with humour and his
voice is compelling. Ortlieb is among the very best poets
writing in France today, and this bi-lingual selection
of his work will cement his growing reputation in the
anglophone world.
A poet of uprootedness and displacement, with a
uniquely gentle and rueful wit
It is no disservice to Gilles Ortlieb, not to place him
among the “visionaries”. Rather, he is possessed of
an eye that can discern, within the thicket
of the real, the unnoticed, which may be its accessory
or its reject. For the unnoticed is also this:
the thing we conceal from ourselves.
Reading the poems of Gilles Ortlieb, one’s focus is
never blurred. Rather, everything is extraordinarily
distinct. One emerges with clearer vision, and with
an increased interest in the world.
ISBN: 9781911469421
Published December 2023