<i>"Patches of Sunlight, Or of Shadow</i> is the fourth volume culled from Jaccottet’s many private notebooks, translated from French by John Taylor. In short and fragmentary paragraphs of quotation, reflection, and description, it covers in one leap the years — 1952-2005 — successively covered by the last three such volumes. It has a self-consciously valedictory tenor, and it is full of bracketed editorial comments by Jaccottet, inserted in 2008 when he made the selection, which often explain that this or that passage should be viewed as a supplement to excerpts published in a previous volume. This book is more personally revealing than the previous ones, and sometimes it is more openly critical of the poet’s contemporaries, lending the whole production an air of the declassified document available to the public now that the mission that occasioned its secrecy has been completed. But there are no big revelations here, only a confirmation of what attentive readers of Jaccottet have known for a long time: that his work is rooted in a deep and sustained reflection on the existential reality of death, and the countervailing abundance of life, and a reading of nature and culture through that lens."

On the Seawall

"With <i>Patches of Sunlight, or of Shadow</i>,<i> </i>John Taylor has given us another reminder of the beauty of Philippe Jaccottet’s own work, which is never less than an incitement to inhabit the earth a bit more fully."

Reading in Translation