Apollinaire, Guillaume: Bestiary

An early and influential champion of cubism, the friend of Braque, Picasso, Dufy, Rousseau, and Marie Laurencin (who became his mistress), Apollinaire was a seminal figure in the revolutionary art style known as "Surrealism," a term that he coined some seven years before Breton formally founded the movement. In this charming book, published in 1910 and embellished with the graphically sophisticated and totally appropriate woodcuts of Dufy, we find the poet at his most accessi- ble. His quatrains, printed in Dante italic and felicitously translated by Pepe Karmel, present a voice that ranges from the colloquial to the impassioned, a brisk combi- nation of lyric imagery and bawdy humor (not surpris- ing for a poet who, after a pious adolescence, supported himself by writing pornography). This small format reissue of a celebratedlivre de peintreis a small bijou of a book, a lovely and lively ensemble of accessible poetry and striking woodcut art.