Jacques Prévert (1900–1977)

Paroles is Prévert's best-known collection, containing pieces dating from the early thirties to the end of the war. There are a couple of longer prose pieces, the satire "Tentative de déscription d'un diner de têtes à Paris-France" and the quasi-autobiographical "Souvenirs de Famille ou L'Ange Garde-Chiourme", but otherwise the collection is mostly poems and songs, including a short-story-length "feuilleton" in free verse, "La crosse en l'air".

Lots of political engagement, as you'd expect in the thirties: Prévert knew a thing or two about being hungry and unemployed himself, and he takes up the cause of victims of the economic crisis in many of the pieces here, and there is also plenty of ammunition to spare for Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and the Roman Catholic Church. ("La crosse en l'air", which opens with a bishop drunk in the gutter, covers just about all these satirical bases in one place.) Anti-war poems feature heavily as well, also as you'd expect. Lots of lists, too, Prévert's favourite structural device, lots of wordplay, and quite a few absurd leaps of logic. Altogether good fun, even if he goes a bit too far here and there.… (more)