Francine Bouchet's quiet shift from verse to prose
The Swiss poet, long known for her verse collections, has been moving toward brief prose tableaux in her two most recent books.
Francine Bouchet has spent her career writing poetry built around movement. "J'aime les trajets, les parcours, ils sont le reflet de la vie," she says, quoted by Le Courrier — journeys and paths, she explains, mirror life itself. That sense of movement has long shaped her verse collections, and according to the same profile, it continues to organize her work even as her writing has changed form.
After several books written in verse, Bouchet gave in to what Le Courrier's profile calls the "tentation de la prose" — the temptation of prose. Her two latest books take the shape of brief prose tableaux rather than lines of verse.
One of those books, En marge, is singled out in the profile for the presence of narration within its short prose pieces — a departure, however modest, from the more purely lyric mode of her earlier collections.
The source material available to us is limited to this short profile from Le Courrier, so further detail on Bouchet's bibliography, publishers or the second of the two recent books is not something we can supply here.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
