Paris: Éditions du Point du jour, 1945

With its cover photograph by Brassaï (1899–1984) this book of poems by Prévert, a poet and screen writer of great versatility, was the most successful poetry book of 1945/1946. This first edition sold out immediately and it has become the fourth most widely read French classic of the period. The book contains 95 unpunctuated texts of varying lengths – from 35 pages to a few words. It is the spontaneity and oral qualities of the texts that make them so attractive. In ‘Barbara’, a poem to a woman he once saw in Brest, in the arms of another man, he asks if they survived in a city destroyed by bombing in ‘Quelle connerie la guerre’ (the war, what damned stupidity).