Plurality of Worlds of Lewis     by Jacques Roubaud, Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop Original title: La pluralité des mondes de Lewis Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: March 1, 1995 Format: Paperback, 109 pages ISBN: 1564780694 List Price: $9.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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This collection of prose and poetry elaborates on themes explored in Roubaud's Some Thing Black, which the Times Literary Supplement called "a harrowing book . . . an elegy for our time." As in t he earlier collection, Roubaud grapples with the grief he continues to feel at the untimely death of his young wife. In parts 1 and 2, he uses the possible existence of many worlds as a means by which to transcend the trauma of this unbearable loss. (Davi d Lewis's book "On the Plurality of Worlds" provided the inspiration and title for Roubaud's book.) These poems also rage against the limitations of poetry itself, which can only clarify the exactness of his grief, not assuage it. In part 3, Roubaud uses a mathematically precise form to explore the idea of form. As a meditation on both grief and on poetry, The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis is a memorable achievement.

"Writing as a poet-philosopher, Roubaud . . . casts a delicate net of language to apprehend ideas that most compel him. . . . The poems . . . are filled with play of light and shadows, and define loss as if metered by questions, suppositions and impossibilities. . . . Precisely measured and deeply moving, Roubaud's meditations are rendered in W aldrop's translation with force and nuance."—Publishers Weekly

"Ghostly presences inhabit these spaces that these lyric poems and fluid fictions construct. Rosmarie Waldrop's translation brings to the surface the obsessive, repetitive thought patterns tha t characterize grief. . . . Roubaud . . . asks language to propose equivalencies and transformations."—Texture

"Highly recommended."—American Poet