Tabac Blond – Christopher Moncrieff

Description

The poetry of Christopher Moncrieff is European poetry, translated into the poet’s mother tongue from original compositions in German and French, but its cadences and rhythms remain Franco-Germanic… Brecht, Castiglione, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Kavafis, Kafka, Hölderlin, Hofmannsthal, Mann and Stanescu populate these lyrical meditations  unobtrusively… The formative poems on school days and experiences as a young officer bring to mind the German Bildungsroman mode and such works as Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless… In these travelling verses we visit Bucharest, Budapest, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Prague, Belfast… Fitting, then, that this collection is called Tabac Blond, after the once-popular European perfume by Caron (1919), the distinctly bohemian, even decadent scent of which is evoked by Moncrieff in a wonderful olfactory image: ‘citron, tobacco and antiquary leather’…