Selected poems from the critically acclaimed author of Atomised
and Submission
Dual-language edition
Michel Houellebecq is a poet, essayist and novelist. He is the author of several novels including The Map and the Territory (winner of the Prix Goncourt), Atomised, Platform, Whatever and Submission. He was awarded the Legion d'Honneur in 2019.
Houellebecq’s poetry opens a revealing window into a stubbornly
consistent career. Readers who enjoy the dandyish despair of his
fiction will not be shocked to find that, in poetry, Houellebecq
channels masters such as Baudelaire – such a giant ghost here that
he almost deserves a co-author’s credit – and Verlaine . . . But
who knew that, in English, Houellebecq could sound so much like
Philip Larkin – or even John Betjeman.'
*The Arts Desk*
All six of his [Houellebecq’s] novels, beginning with Whatever in
1994, now look like contemporary classics. What’s less well-known
among his English-language readers is that he began his literary
career as a poet … In his poetry Houellebecq presents the shocks
and absurdities of modern life not casually but with beautiful
formality, in alexandrines worthy of his beloved Lamartine, or
quatrains as precise and irrefutably rhymed as those of A E
Housman, charting what is not to be endured. His poetry is often
not only absolutely direct emotionally – contrary to his reputation
as a misogynistic cynic, deeply romantic even – but also remarkably
funny, deploying, as Novak-Lechevalier observes, an art of montage,
“the brutal juxtaposition of heterogeneities” … Michel Houellebecq
is one of those writers who matters now, in his entirety, if any
do.
*Evening Standard*
When much modern poetry consists of trivial snapshots of daily
life, it’s invigorating to come on a poet who speaks of first and
last things, of love and its disappointments of cheated hopes, of
the rare pleasure of moments of beauty.
*The Scotsman*
Michel Houellebecq’s latest English language poetry collection,
Unreconciled, evokes a strange nostalgia. While this relentlessly
downbeat collection is entirely composed of poems from between 1991
and 2013, it feels far older than that … A must-read for the
present day.
*The Millions*
Houellebecq is perfectly suited to the age of Trump.
*Guardian*
Houellebecq’s genius was to find out what his agony meant, to trace
his personal fractures until they revealed the deepest traumas of a
society and an age. No-one has been more interestingly unhappy than
Houellebecq.
*Irish Times*
Thoughts expertly condensed into verse.
*Independent Daily Edition*
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