Small Pleasures
3:AM fits. We met through 3:AM. We didn’t, really, but it’s possible. We both read 3:AM religiously. Small books brought us together; small books made by large people too large to be “general” — to us, at least. He emailed me from Melbourne in 2012; he asked questions around the titles I was publishing and many times felt like my only devotee. The only logical thing to do was to marry. We eventually did — marry — but then he got ill and left me with a son and this document to publish. …This is a review of a life, written in its last week; the moments remembered he was soon to part from.
By Matthew O’Shannessy. Introduction by Rebekah Weikel.
Mérat and Nerval
Mérat and Nerval also shared a love for the theatre and adored the actresses they saw on stage — whose reality could never live up to the idealistic impressions of them created in the poets’ imaginations. In 1853, when Mérat was thirteen, Nerval’s Odelettes were published, containing ‘Une Allée du Luxembourg’, a poem set in the gardens that would become Mérat’s favourite part of Paris — and overlooking which he would later live many of his happiest years. The poem’s theme of an idealised love, happened on by chance amid the beauties of nature, which seems to promise perfection but ends in loss and grief, could almost be a template for Mérat’s own love poetry.
Read an extract from Tim Michell‘s Albert Mérat: Rimbaud’s Seer.
Four Poems from Les Chimères
The house erupted in the fresh voices of women.
They chatted; one laughed her twenty-year-old laugh,
While on the edge of the red, trembling skies,
The sun set in its huge bed of flames.
On blades, with burning kisses, the stars shone prisms
Shimmering with coloured reflections.
Sometimes on the strong backs of murmuring, blue waves,
A boat slid by with the sound of oars…
Four poems by Albert Mérat translated by Tim Mitchell.