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  • Published: 13 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781681379920
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $49.99
Categories:

Elegies

  • Emmanuel Hocquard



The central works of one of France's most renowned poets, now translated into English for the first time.

The central works of one of France's most renowned poets, now translated into English for the first time.

Emmanuel Hocquard's Elegies, written over some twenty-five years, lie at the core of his oeuvre, one of the most admired in contemporary French poetry. They sound the depths of the past, finding it ever deeper, and they pose the question: To whom does the past belong? Like air and water, Hocquard suggests, the past is a commons shared by all. His Elegies are full of quotidian detail—the life of the street and the marketplace, overheard conversations, glimpses of private existence—even as they make room for the ancient world from which the form of the elegy descends. 

Hocquard has distinguished between two types of elegiac poet—what he calls the classic and the inverse. The classic ruminates on the past; the inverse remakes it. Hocquard is an inverse elegiac poet: Rich with the past, his poems lead us into an ever-expanding present.

  • Published: 13 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781681379920
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $49.99
Categories:

Praise for Elegies

"It is a major event to have Emmanuel Hocquard's masterwork available to a new audience. The implicit subject of this book, like all elegy, is time and its inscrutability—to be located nowhere and everywhere at once. The capacious voice of these poems conjures a layered presence where each perception feels far away in time and yet extraordinarily intimate and direct. Cole Swensen's brilliant translation is a tour de force and allows for all the magic to happen." — Peter Gizzi