The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes

The Vitals

By Marie de Quatrebarbes

Translated from the French by Aiden Farrell

World Poetry Books 2025

More than a century has passed since Guillame Apollinaire limped back from the front in Champagne, dizzy beneath the bandages circling his skull. One literary experiment followed another in those days, but the privilege of any moment is to look backward: line up the successes alongside the failures, learn from others’ mistakes. Maybe it’s only human—this not learning—but that doesn’t stop us from wishing things were otherwise, as witness the contemptible state of most contemporary poetry.

French poet Marie de Quatrebarbes’ English debut, The Vitals, is an uncharacteristically impenetrable volume from World Poetry Books. Her experiments with sense and syntax amount to an almost unbearable test of the powers of poetic suggestion. In a consciously blinkered style that delights in stifling meaning on every page, de Quatrebarbes has turned out a sequence of prose poems that do nothing to justify the French infatuation with the form.

I stooped to the level of my fear, and as she retraced her steps with the animals, we returned to the variously broken and fading lights. Unaltered design, the same assemblage of wool and paper stuck to the ground like dust, the little watch face broke. What do we know about them when they reach us? Questions are visual, arguments that churn in the hills with pebbles rolling from the ground into pockets, wearing down the inner lining. The light may have adjusted to what she can see. What of song without wind?

In his “Translator’s Afterword,” Aiden Farrell notes how the poems’ sentences “end on subordinating conjunctions, active and passive voices play opposite day, and prepositional gestures usurp the main clauses.” He accounts for the blurring of subjects and objects, “obscuring whether a figure is a person, an hourglass, or a shout from the children’s bedroom.” Such comments—really, an apology for an indefensible style—sound like nothing so much as the feedback supplied by an English teacher on a badly mangled term paper. Let’s call it what it is: poor grammar.

The book is structured after a journal, its section titles spanning the months of August to December. Each section encompasses a series of prose poems numbered after the days: “1st.” is followed by “2.,” and so forth—though the months are shot through with the same gaps that tend to distinguish any real journal: August ends on “5.,” while September’s “6.” leaps to “11.” This tiny bit of realism—inconstancy spurred by busyness, avoidance, or sloth—might have added up to something if the poems themselves did.

But meaning is never forthcoming. Even those half-conscious “clouds” of meaning that sometimes materialize fitfully in the space of an experimental text are never forthcoming. Official words on the back of the book indicate that the poems were written to express the complicated experience of losing a loved one. But short of being on speaking terms with the poet, short of having the poet let you in on this secret, there is simply no way you would ever know better.

The book leaves the reader with no choice but to try tracing one disruptive sentence after another back to its nominal source. When de Quatrebarbes writes that “I stand on the restraints of rather small quantities of water,” does she mean that life is precious, that it dries up, like water does? Is she talking about tears—“small quantities” because she’s cried all she possibly can? When she follows this sentence up, writing that “I wouldn’t like to have poured it out for anything in the world,” does she mean that she wouldn’t have poured it out even if it meant bringing back her loved one?

If the book’s aim is irrationality for its own sake—something like the surrealist’s longing for illumination edging out rational understanding—then its language is too tame, its constructions too slipshod. No, The Vitals is simply a chore. It offers the irritating task of tapping its own skeleton key against a slew of unsusceptible sentences.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.