Interlude

A traveller, in fresh pursuit of old truths, moves through the moraines of time and space picking up stones and words, and in both he discovers stories about the beginning of being. He is a man looking for bottles of good wine, friendly villagers, transcripts of magic learning, and what he receives is wordless teaching made manifest in flower-words that float from the twining snake’s mouth. This is a book of revelation concerning the vegetal creation of the human creature. The marvellous and true, the pedantic and profound, intermingle and make anew the old mysteries of Annunciation, Visitation, Birth, Adoration, Nutrition, Journey, Parables, Passion, Death and Resurrection, Ascension and Life. The extraordinary is affirmed in the ordinary.

The anthropology, philology and mythology of a poet’s imagination. At first, the reader is somewhat disoriented — is this experience imaginary or set in specific times and places, for the poet is moving through the actual world, and yet the vision is hermetic and mysterious. A unique book of revelations about the origins of the imagination and life on earth.

Robert Marteau is one of France’s great poets. Born in 1925, close to the medieval pilgrimage route to Compostela, he now lives in Quebec, where he says he is “rediscovering my origins, rallying eagerly to the patrimony, and, as a poet, passionately learning to know my homeland.”