Pierre-Alain Tâche

L'Etat des lieux

« l'on croit soudain sentir, dans l'air léger, comme un surcroît d'humanité »

The triptych «l'Etat des lieux» occupies a central place in the work of Pierre-Alain Tâche, which spans a period of more than fifty years. In an inventory of places, landscapes and reminiscences about literature, art and mythology, the poet rekindles a sense for the immediacy of life, between disillusionment, hidden irony and light-heartedness, even if that immediacy is only a dream. Our presence in the world becomes more concrete in contact with works far removed from it, in that they impose a limit on the duration of our fleeting absence.

In a rhythm that is at once languid and tense, the poems of Pierre-Alain Tâche, which are often interspersed with short sections of prose, make time slow down. None of the books really form the centre of the triptych, nor are they the beginning or end. Any possible chronology is disrupted by a thousand different readings, forming a spiral that expands in all directions rather than a narrative of the past.
In spite of the continual failure that eats away at any unshakeable adherence to the world, the poet continues to write, to «conserve the deep-rooted song» by «biding one’s time», all the while wondering at the impenetrability of the world.

(Françoise Delorme, transl. by Andrea Mason Willfratt)

Translation of title: The State of Things

Editions Empreintes, Lausanne 1998

ISBN: 2-940133-29-8