Edmond Jabès writes as though language has already been broken by exile and must now be rebuilt from ash, silence, interruption, and doubt. 

Le Seuil Le Sable gathers the poems across four decades, showing the full arc of a body of work that moves between lyric utterance and philosophical fracture, always preoccupied with absence, naming, Judaism, wandering, and the impossible task of writing after loss.

These are not poems that offer themselves up easily. They circle the void rather than filling it. But that is exactly where Jabès matters: he turns poetry into a site of questioning, where thought becomes rhythm and the page becomes a place of disappearance, memory, and survival. A serious copy for readers of Blanchot, Celan, Derrida, and anyone who likes poetry that thinks with its wounds.

Gallimard Poésie edition of Jabès’s collected poems. In good condition, some marginalia in black ink inside, otherwise great.