By Claire Eder
When encountering a new poetic voice, especially one that reaches me in translation, I often find myself flipping frequently between the main text and the notes section in the back of the book, grasping for purchase. Once the poems have drawn me in, I want more. I’m nosy and I desire at least some of the crucial details about this person: what was their childhood like? Why does the image of an orange slice keep reappearing? What is this geopolitical conflict, not obvious to a twenty-first century American reader, that they’re referencing in certain poems? While endnotes in academic texts can be dry, I find the notes in volumes of poetry can often be juicy, giving little peeks behind the curtain.
For this reason, I am enthusiastic about the format that Christina Cook has created in Roaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquart (Aim Higher, 2025), and I’d be happy to see other works in translation adopt such a structure. Roaming the Labyrinth essentially takes the notes section, expands it, and plops it into the main text. The poems are nested in between prose sections offering analysis, context, and personal reflection. (The book also has actual endnotes with helpful material.) Through this unique structure, we get a rare glimpse into the translator-poet relationship, in this case a friendship that lasted many years, until Bancquart’s death in 2019. We come to understand certain choices that Cook made in her translations, and we get a true portrait of the remarkable, generous writer at the center of the text (labyrinth). What’s more, we are privy to a conversation between the translations and Cook’s own poetry, as she includes a handful of her poems that were shaped by her relationship with Bancquart.
But let me pause for a minute and tell you why you need to read Marie-Claire Bancquart. As a graduate student studying translation, I discovered a poem of hers in an anthology of contemporary French poets and was compelled to seek out more of her work. The poems’ lucid, rock-solid images and unpredictable turns stood out from the work of other French poets I was reading at the time, which tended toward the obscure and the abstract. Bancquart’s stance is that of a philosopher, a paleontologist, and a mystic. These are poems that call to something primordial in us. They are embodied, they’re down in the loam and the soil. “For me, writing must above all include concrete experience, whether real or imagined,” Bancquart says in her interview with Cook. These poems, while indeed centered in concrete experience and often relatively compact on the page, are up to their necks in the big questions: what does death feel like, if we’re made up of atoms that disperse into new forms? How does a tree experience the passing of time? What facets of our modern lives are rooted in the passion and violence of ancient myths? What will the earth be like millions of years from now, when humans are extinct? Consider the dizzying metamorphosis that occurs in the first poem featured in this collection, “Deep in the Body” (“Au profond du corps”):
Eyelids closed
our look deep in the body
sees countless birds
going from lungs to far-off cells
we stretch
in our skin’s constriction
become
a tree, sky included
we hold the bird up.
What’s just as shocking as the audacity of the poems is the fact that the majority of Bancquart’s work has yet to be translated into English. For this reason, I was excited to learn about this book by a talented translator who was intimate with the poet herself. Roaming the Labyrinth is an excellent introduction to this essential contemporary French voice, and beyond that, it’s an enjoyable, genre-defying journey.
In the prose sections, Cook narrates her first encounter with Bancquart in 2005: a leisurely interview spread out over a day, including a tour of Paris by the poet. We get a strong sense of the winding streets filled with vendors and interrupted by public gardens, as depicted in the beginning of Bancquart’s poem “Millenial” (“Millénaires”):
Mankind, this late in coming, rewinds a thread of the world
along the stalls of produce
crates, market pallets
smell, wet, like their tree of origin.
Cook’s seemingly simple journey from hotel to the poet’s apartment, then to dinner, and finally back to the hotel is shadowed by the narrative of the Minotaur’s labyrinth, which forms another strand of the prose sections (and literally, in the myth, Theseus uses a piece of string to find his way back out of the labyrinth, “rewinding a thread of the world” as above). This myth is prominently featured in some of the poems as well as in excerpts from a collaborative project, the microtonal oratio Book of the Labyrinth (Livre du labyrinthe, Mode Records, 2003) that Marie-Claire worked on with her husband Alain Bancquart, a renowned composer. One excerpt, “The Minotaur,” dramatizes the beast’s murder by Theseus. At the moment of the Minotaur’s death,
He deplores being wrenched across to the other shore.
He, the solar, the violent, now
something merges him with the fir trees’ tears
with people’s wounds, slaughterhouses
mixed with
the juicy flesh of unknown fruits, rivers’ sweetness.
Cook also likens the day in Paris to the journey through the 22 Major Arcana of the tarot—another frequent subject of Bancquart’s. These three journeys, the literal route through Paris and the two figurative paths of labyrinth and tarot, are braided together to form the main structure of the book. In between the strands, Cook presents the translations (alongside the original French text), some context for Bancquart’s work, her own reflections, and a few of her own poems. It’s a complex mixture of genre and voice, and given the Bancquarts’ shared life of music and poetry, I have to think that Marie-Claire would have found the book’s form most appropriate. In a sense, Roaming the Labyrinth presents not just a portrait but a mythology of the writer: her thematic touchstones, her personal travails, her transformative impact.
This impact is demonstrated through Cook’s reflections on the ways in which her relationship with the Bancquarts and her close reading of Marie-Claire’s poetry has shaped her own work. For example, Cook describes how Bancquart’s obsessions and imagery entered her own writing and aided her in coping with her mother’s illness and death. (Bancquart has a very intense and even celebratory approach to death, which is a frequent theme in her work.) “Thanks to the paths of thought grooved out by Marie-Claire, I was able to write poems that merged my mother with the flora and fauna that fleshed out the estuaries, rivers, beaches, and singular lake of the shoreline town where I grew up; where she’d grown up before me,” Cook writes. Her poem “The Faith I Had in Death” joins together the body and its natural surroundings in a dance of death and life:
I saw a single lapwing land
in a dogwood whose dead red limbs had spread
like veins above the sedge; or was that I jutting out
of the reeds; my body stiffened and stayed there, hollow
as a dance the damp air did with circuitous strands
of light?
It’s refreshing to experience the call and response between the two voices, Cook’s musicality and flowing lines contrasting with Bancquart’s startling imagery and impossible logic.
Translators are used to being somewhat invisible, hidden behind the text, and of course there are many good reasons why we don’t always call attention to ourselves. But this book demonstrates that sometimes the text is richer if readers can acquaint themselves more fully with both parties in the creative exchange. Our understanding of Bancquart is enhanced because we witness the interactions between her and Cook during this visit; we see her generosity and passion as she shares a day with a young translator, and we see how this generosity marks its recipient. And, recognizing this quality, we may catch its light shining in the poems and the translations as a sort of openness of spirit, a curiosity, a receptivity to the hidden depths of things. We contemplate Bancquart’s thesis that humans are separated from animals, plants, and objects by only the thinnest sliver of difference, and we join her in wonder. As she writes in “Interval” (“Intervalle”), referencing perhaps the tiny steps in her husband’s microtonal music:
Dressed as a woman, I go forth
from the same earth as this tree
whose years
are girdled into the furniture’s grain.
A fragment of a second half note
is our difference.
Claire Eder’s poems and translations have appeared in the Hopkins Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, the Colorado Review, the Cincinnati Review, and The Common, among other publications. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida and a PhD in poetry from Ohio University. Find her online at claireeder.com.
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