In Their Own Words
Andrew Seguin on Jean Follain
Three Poems
The Notice
The child pushing along the ring of a barrel
as his makeshift hoop
runs alone and shouts
but to the one who has just spelled out
beneath the N and the eagle of Empire
the draft notice
the old man says simply
in the blazing sun while drinking a foamy pear cider:
“the next century will be worse”
though lovers go by singing.
The Fire
Ivy hung in long vines
from the gray house
of the metaphysician
fire took it one night
lighting up the cropped plain
ashes floated in the air
through the smell of burnt hay
then the heavens cleared
above the ruin overrun
by scores of motherless children
who played in its breaches
dressed in dark rags
imagining their long life.
Village Square
In the village square
at the foot of the church
one of the drinkers puts on
the kepi of his soldier friend as a joke
above them the hour strikes so loudly
they flinch
a horse that is unhitched
when it stamps the soft earth
radiates an abundant calm
they say to get there
leave before nightfall.
Translated from the French by Andrew Seguin
Reprinted from Earthly: Selected Poems of Jean Follain (The Song Cave, 2025) with the permission of the publisher and translator.
Andrew Seguin on Jean Follain
Jean Follain was struck by a car and killed just after midnight near the Place de la Concorde in Paris in 1971, a brutal irony considering how many of his poems are rutted by farm carts and horse carriages and apple wagons. Born in 1903 in Canisy, a small town in Normandy, Follain watched the men and animal-powered conveyances of his rural childhood go off to the First World War, most never to return. The embers of that agrarian world were later extinguished by increasing industrialization and the Second World War. “There are almost no more horses,” Follain wrote in 1960.
Follain’s poems emerge from that remembered landscape of farmers, wheelwrights, seamstresses, animals and fields, but to call them pastoral would be a misdirection. They have more in common with the quantum world, where matter is simultaneous, both particle and wave. Follain will find the eternal in a kernel of wheat, tumbled into the fold of a dress, or a tool left out in a garden. For time is his ultimate subject— how it overlaps and doubles back in memory, how each arriving instant contains past and future, and how sad it is to lose it.
the boy has such bright eyes
then there’s the girl who will die young
and one whose body will be alone
they are all washing their hands in shadow
beside lush vegetation
and are still in that time
of living in eternity.
(“The Children,” from Territoires, 1953)
The poem occurs in present tense yet the children’s future is present, too, being seen by someone who knows what is coming, and is therefore looking back. It is this simultaneity of remarkable things, terrible things—thus ordinary things—that Follain is always finding words for, and which gives his poems their particular pangs and mysteries.
He sounds like no one else. His phrasing, his syntax, his curious punctuation, seem to take the mind out like a dog, let it sniff a post, before arriving somewhere unexpected. Some of this is just how the French language works, but much is Follain’s peculiar sense of joinery— who put this thing together this way? Where are the nails?
As many have remarked, Follain almost never writes from “I.” He sets out more frequently from “on,” the third person pronoun in French that in English can be rendered most literally as “one,” or, in other contexts, “you” or “they” or “we.” It can also suggest the passive voice. Follain’s third person evokes an impassive and seemingly omniscient gaze, located at a remove, surveying the landscape and its species, yet intimate with the most minute particulars. A specific consciousness, with intense affection for the world around it, is clearly present, but it is less interested in itself than in tracing the connections suffusing all things, the umbels of plants, an insect crawling up a boot, the woman sitting on a hearth asking “why beings and things / and not nothing.” A timeless question. And Follain’s poems do feel timely, as the ravages of our human-centric worldview upon plants and animals—our species forgetting that it, too, is an animal among them—mount toward irreversibility, as war unfolds where it has so many times before.
After his Norman upbringing, Follain studied law and became a lawyer in Paris. His poems began to appear in journals alongside some of the Sagesse group, and the first of his thirteen books of poems, La Main chaude, was published in 1933. Prose works soon followed, including, in 1935, Paris, a beautiful flânerie of the city he made his home, and several memoirs of his childhood in Canisy and the nearby city of Saint-Lô, which was decimated by Allied bombs in WWII. Follain later became a magistrate in Charleville (the natal village of Rimbaud), to which he commuted while still living in Paris on the Place des Vosges.
Follain traveled widely throughout the 1960s, to Peru, Chile and Bolivia, to Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal, but these voyages barely surface in the later poems. His cosmopolitanism and catholic interests come forth more in his diverse prose. He wrote a celebration of the potato, which included a memory of the particular tangue, or mud, that was harvested in the Norman estuaries and used to cultivate a varietal called Early Rose, grown by his father; a glossary of ecclesiastical slang; and short texts on subjects as varied as legal actions taken against animals, the history of la claque—paid applauders—in the French theater, and the customs of wearing a tuxedo. The mind rummaging through all this is there in the poems too, naming, sometimes with an obscure synonym, the particulars of its one and only world.
Excerpted from Andrew Seguin's introduction to Jean Follain's Earthly: Selected Poems of Jean Follain (The Song Cave, 2025).
