Seedtime III, by Philippe Jaccottet
Notebooks 1995 - 1998
Seagull Books, September 2021
Philippe Jaccottet has described his notebooks as “a collection of delicate seeds with which I replant, I try to replant my ‘spiritual forest’.” Indeed, the entries consistently open windows onto new vistas, some familiar from his poems, others still moist with the dew of possibility. The natural world and particularly the landscape of Grignan has been an endless source of inspiration for his poetry. In an entry from October, 1998, written forty-five years after his first collection of poems, L’Effraie (The Screech Owl), appeared Jaccottet is still searching for l’expression juste that will capture the beauty of the world around him and to understand his aesthetic impulses.
The notebooks bring enriching facets of context and background to Jaccottet’s poetry. The entries place in sharp relief the gap between his intentions and final works. Metaphor and simile become epistemological tools, keys to understanding the mysteries of the world around us. Description is a means of perception, a way to understand not just our surroundings but our place in the world and the ‘mysterious metamorphosis of loss’ that underlies the human condition.
The animating force in Jaccottet’s writing is the drive to transcend the limitations of language and literary forms, an aspiration he has acknowledged as elusive, if not impossible. And so he returns to his starting points again and again, refining, refreshing, altering, erasing, creating, and recreating. A clump of violets, drops of rain hanging from bare, wintery branches, irises gleaming like lanterns: such images recur throughout the years as if bearing hidden messages he must decipher through writing and reflection.
