Showers and Bright Spells

Henri Droguet's savvy derangements of language call for a super-savvy translator, and found that prestidigitator in Alexander Dickow. With neologisms, internal-intestinal rhymes, arcane diction, a fierce wit, Droguet creates dreamscapes at once linguistically fraught and true to his North Atlantic habitat. His song, he says in "Soliloquy," is "spasm hemorrhage/ epiphanic and black." These are poems of mortal intensity.