In the preceding issue of The Bitter Oleander, I accompanied translated excerpts of Pierre-Albert Jourdan's sequence, L'Entrée dans le jardin (The Entryway into the Garden), with some biographical information about this French poet and, especially, prose poet who remains much too little-known. For readers of French, the two books to hunt down are Les Sandales de paille (The Straw Sandals, 1987) and Le Bonjour et l'adieu (The Good Morning and the Farewell, 1991). These thick volumes constitute Jourdan's incomplete Oeuvres complètes at Mercure de France: a final volume, which should have comprised an unpublished novel evoking the French underground during the Second World War, never appeared. Yet the latter manuscript is uncharacteristic of Jourdan's style, most favored literary genres, typical subject matter, let alone his vantage point on Nature and metaphysics. Jourdan tends to be neo-transcendentalist in outlook, indeed somewhat Thoreau-like, and was increasingly influenced by his readings in Eastern philosophy. Rather naturally for a French writer of his sensibility, which can be likened to that of his friends Philippe Jaccottet (b. 1925) and Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923), he is likewise engaged by the "Cartesian" antipode of this perspective: a skeptical grappling with the self and subjectivity. In his many memorable "fragments"-a favorite term-maxims, diary entries, notebook jottings, and short prose pieces, Jourdan describes landscapes with stunning vividness and depth (he was also a skilled painter), admires and draws out the significance of humble plants in and around his garden at his country home in the Vaucluse village of Caromb, and keeps questioning both the miracle of aliveness and the specter of death, especially during the last year of his life, when he was dying from lung cancer. He also penned scathing vignettes of social satire.

Excerpted from John Taylor's Introduction to The Approach:

Jourdan's focus on death necessarily sharpens in his last book, L'Approche (The Approach), a notebook-diary that was first issued posthumously in 1984. (He died in 1981 at the age of fifty-seven.) This journal records thoughts, books read, daily routines, and hospital experiences during the poet's five-month long wrestling with terminal illness. In an essay that I wrote about Jourdan in 1995, I speculated rather abstractly about what he envisioned with this term "approach," notably the possibility of merging at last with a Nature from which he had been "separated." I likewise pointed out, rightly (I still think) but also abstractly, that in comparison to "many other twentieth-century authors fascinated with death . . . he reacts to our grim predicament by groping for a path leading away from the terminuses of nihilism and a resigned, hopeless materialism."

The Approach can certainly be interpreted at this philosophical level, but now that I have spent two years translating a major selection of all Jourdan's prose writings, I would like to emphasize how intensely human and down-to-earth this book and all his other writings are. The Approach is the journal of a writer who, confronted with fear, fatigue, redoubtable examinations (like fiberscopies), debilitating coughing spells and increasing chest pain, struggles to maintain his literary and spiritual aspirations at the highest level. He manages to observe himself with detachment, even with humor. "Can one say 'breathing on tiptoe'?" he wonders when he has elsewhere evoked gasping and suffocating; he adds in parentheses: "(As when one wants to get out of a nasty situation.)" As to writing under such circumstances, he depicts his daily efforts in various complementary ways...

The following excerpt was selected from Jourdan's L'Approche:

Motionless contemplation impregnated with the plant world and bordered by light. Non-action cleansed of those overflowing glosses in which you drown-experienced, even so, with a highly ironic smile so as not to mask the lack of rigor and total simplicity-and this causes what is gained, instead of bearing its fruit in silence and blossoming in the fibers of Being, to end up as a note written down, an excessive use of ink. This is an irresistible need: you cannot uproot everything. No satisfaction is involved: this is my only excuse. Yet the act of writing down notes does not remove any of the calmness that I feel, as if there were a sort of complicity enabling me to partake of an ant, a bee, a butterfly, a rosemary bush, an olive tree, or a cloud. Enabling me to get closer to the dream of a body extending to the dimensions of the Cosmos. If it is indeed a dream and not, as I believe, truth coiled in the depths of Being.

This notion of belonging must be acquired inside yourself. Like digesting food. Chewing a mountain would, for example, be necessary for rising. Another kind of chewing, perhaps.

Does this go beyond the framework of our preoccupations? I willingly agree. But our illnesses are forged by our preoccupations, whose very framework is so narrow that sometimes our heads get stuck inside and cannot be withdrawn without our becoming half crazy.

There must then be a more flexible path or at least a compromise allowing us to loosen the strangler's noose a little.