To each of us, and without effort, Supervielle can speak “her sweet native language”. This is not necessarily the criterion of a poetry of high smoothness, and Mallarmé would be there to tell us precisely the opposite. But it is that of a daily poetry, peaceful and reassuring, present, faithful to all the levels of our life, capable of taming our fears and our sorrows, of redouble our joys, and in its best moments of giving us the secret of a fantastic within human reach. Witness his renewed bestiaries, his naive cosmology, his soulful botany, his humor without aggressiveness and without ulterior motives. It is certainly necessary to associate with Supervielle the beautiful word with which Borges qualifies Verlaine: "innocent as the birds".
For a musician, as much as Verlaine, Supervielle is an inexhaustible treasure. Everything, or almost everything, sings spontaneously, lavishly, in these fluid and moving poems. The Verlainian art of verse is certainly more considerable (I speak of the first Verlaine, who dies with Wisdom), surer, more devious too, skilful in playing with all the subterfuges of meter and rhythm. There is not the shadow of a process at Supervielle, for whom "writing" is above all not "composing". In "compose", it is the prefix that is at fault, by all that it suggests of assembly, combination, recourse to the various tools which we learn to use with Banville. In Supervielle, we hear the nursery rhyme more frequently than the poem: this is probably what retained me in these texts, - in addition to this theme of age, of painless time, of childhood lost forever.
- ISMN: 9790231807912 (M231807912)