Book Description

Poetry. Translated from the French by Norma Cole. Born into a Breton family active in the Resistance during the Second World War, Danielle Collobert moved to Paris at the age of 19. There, she took her own life in the summer of 1978. These notebooks were found in her posession at the time of her death. "Beyond everything she has discovered her own utter nakedness: that owned by nights of relentless attention to the other, or reflected in mirrors of all-night cafés where you can look, listen or simply wait, attending the blank page, from which the lassitude of daybreak will rescue you, overwhelm you."--Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani, from the Postface "She enunciates the words for desire and for loss of the other words with harrowing intensity...[and] explores the limits of the phenomenal body and of speech by the agency of a prose which defies category."--Michael Palmer "In Danielle Collobert's NOTEBOOKS the urgency of her writing is accompanied by the weight of hindsight--that we know how it ends--and yet it is not stifled by morbidity. Instead, the intensity and integrity of her struggles rise to the surface. Collobert's questions--of presence in the world, of politics and intimacy--are constantly recovered from the blur of experience. Collobert moves towards and away in a feverish attempt to connect, stay connected--whether in her personal encounters, moments of activism or writing--and though she ultimately chooses death, there is enough life in her writing to carry on: 'the hum of life all around... I open / and I close.'"--E. Tracy Grinnell "Indelible fragments."--Jeff Jackson "The text of this book is sourced from several notebooks and loose pages found in the Paris hotel room where Danielle Collobert committed suicide... Spanning over 20 years of her life, the text in form resembles the poetry of It Then, though the content is in most cases less abstract. Fragmented phrases separated by dashes describe her interior life, her extensive travels, her relationships with men (though always rather vaguely), her recurring need for solitude, and above all, her experiences with writing. Throughout there is a haunting, hunted desperation in her words, as in each new place she finds herself, she encounters the same familiar struggles with indifference and anxiety, always with death not far from her mind."--S. D. Stewart