Ce qu’il faut de désir. Sophie Nauleau

10 × 19 cm 80 pages softback february 2021 retail price: 12 €

Born in 1977 in Toulouse, Sophie Nauleau is a writer. A doctor in French literature and graduate of the École du Louvre, for France Culture radio she has produced regular programs and documentaries before becoming the artistic director of the Printemps des Poètes, France’s national spring poetry festival. She has composed a number of poetic anthologies especially La Main d’oublies (Galilée) and, with Actes Sud, La Voie de l’écuyer, J’attends un poulain, La Poésie à l’épreuve de soi and Espère en ton courage.

WHAT IS NEEDED OF DESIRE

Sophie Nauleau

After La Poésie à l’épreuve de soi and Espère en ton courage, here is a new work focusing on desire. Desire has been at the heart of all poetic adventure, from the Middle Ages of the Troubadours, through the many artistic renaissances, up until the 21st century. A millennium of lyrical effusion and mystical outpourings, songs and odes to the wonder of love. As much a poet as a painter and sculptor of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo expressed an aspiration for something always vaster and more incredible than the self in his famous prayer: “Lord, give me the grace to always desire more than I can accomplish.” Such is the central theme of this book, which leads us from the obstinate joy of Petrarch or Pernette du Guillet to the joy and torment of the days that project us body and soul beyond our very beings. It examines the ferments of poetry, from the moment the senses become magnetized to that creeping feeling of anxiety, between childhood dreams and battle-hardened impatience, between untold secrets and the seventh heaven, when words dare to express sexual longings and the flights of the mind. In the past and present. No lost illusions, simply the quest for this sovereign Desire that throws upside down the poem of life.

Sophie Nauleau