Poems on tables

I did not expect to survive, / earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect / to waken again, to feel / in damp earth my body / able to respond again, remembering / after so long how to open again / in the cold light / of earliest spring-

I didn’t expect to survive, / the earth having suppressed me. I didn’t expect to / wake up again, feel / in the damp earth my body / able to react again, remember / after so long how to hatch again / in the cold light / of early spring-

We sometimes share the same feeling as the snowdrop evoked by the American poet Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, in her collection The Wild Iris , recently translated into French. At the end of winter, on the threshold of spring, body and spirit awaken and hatch anew, cracking the frost and emerging from a truce that is sometimes welcomed, sometimes endured. This rebirth, both natural and calendrical, has been conducive to poetic creation and expression since the dawn of time. And so it’s not insignificant that, since 2015, the Printemps de la Poésie festival has chosen the fortnight following the spring equinox as the open stage for contemporary poetry in Switzerland.

The seventh edition, to be held from March 19 to April 2, 2022, invites us to savor poetry as a (forbidden) fruit. There are 80 events and 70 partners throughout Switzerland, including your library. On the occasion of World Poetry Day (UNESCO), on Monday March 21, poems and extracts from poems, selected from the BCUL’s rich collections by its librarians, will welcome readers on the work tables of the Unithèque site.

The texts reflect the great diversity and richness of the collections. Particular emphasis has been placed on contemporary works in their original language, accompanied by a French translation. We cross continents and eras, lulled by languages and sounds, from Virgil to Paul Celan, from Pierre de Ronsard to Anna Akhmatova, to contemporary Romance poets.

A selective bibliography of the collections from which the texts are taken is available on Renouvaud. It is complemented by a thematic selection devoted specifically to contemporary poetry in French-speaking Switzerland, “Romandie en poésie”, the fruit of research and development work by our colleagues at the Riponne site in the legal deposit collections.

So come and wander through the corridors of the library in search of one or more captivating poems, sit down for a moment and immerse yourself in these texts or extracts to remember them, “in the cold light / of earliest spring”.