A few words about the author...

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Jean - Claude VILLAIN was born in Mâcon in 1947. He lives nearby the Mediterranean sea. Coming down to the South reflects the geographical aspect of his unended quest which is indeed both tangible and metaphysical. The deep South he is seeking out - through the sun, the light, the sea, the sensuality of naked bodies on the summer sands, but also through a closer approach of its tragic expression - is undoubtedly Mediterranean ; nevertheless is it not set in Provence more than in Spain, Italy, North Africa or Greece.

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In the foreword to Du côté des terres Jean JOUBERT points out the two sides of the poet's sensitiveness. First, the northern lands of his childhood, cold, wet, gloomy. Then his impressions of the South in Face à la mer followed byBrève Béance and Le soleil au plus près. And as one cannot speak of the Mediterranean spirit without thinking of Greece, Le Tombeau des Rois mingles times to conjure up a present and millennial Greece. It initiates a style of poetry marked with mythological recurrence, first prolonged in Roi, guerrier et mendiant and later followed by Et lui grand fauve aimant que l'été traverse,Leur Dit,Sept chants de Relevailles, and Le marchand d'épices in which the forms of prose poem and canto are dominant.

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A poet of places, Jean - Claude VILLAIN has pursued the quest he started in Lieux towards more elementary regions in contact with the prime orders and the desert in Le schiste des songes andParole, exilpreceded by Confins. He has also expressed under a few titles his meditations on life Du gel sur les mains; on writing Paroles pour un silence prochain, Ecrire au sudand on love Le pays d'où je viens s'appelle amour. This paradoxical intermingling of intimacy with space was first articulated in Orbes and later prolonged in a meditation on silence and heldback words inEté, froide saison under a form which is close to haiku. More recently, a new style of writing appeared inThalassa pour un retour as well as in the works that followed:Ithaques,Dix Stèles et une brisées en un jardin and Fragments du fleuve asséché.

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In France and abroad, Jean - Claude VILLAIN has contributed to some forty papers and magazines (Canada, Greece, Israel, Belgium, Tunisia, Morocco, Lithuania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Argentina) by publishing poems and various articles and pieces of criticism. He has also worked in collaboration with the authors or translators at the French versions of Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Persian, Greek and Arabic contemporary poems : Heures, by Elli Péonidou,Poèmes choisis, by Victoria Théodorou, Temple du Cosmos, by Yannis Yfantis,Eléments d'une fuite, by Giulo Marzaiolo, LeTemple du Cosmos, by Yannis Yfantis, Dague au zénith, by Parviz Khazrai.

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Several of his texts have been translated into Italian, Spanish, English, German, Greek, Arabic, Rumanian, Lithuanian, Hebrew and some Slavonic languages. He is also the author of prose works like Matinales de pluie,Aïssawiya,Jean-Max Tixier à l'arête des mots, Essais de compréhension mythologique, Labrys, Yeux ouverts dans le noir, L'Heure de Pan, and Retour au Sud as well as Artists´ books :(S)ombre(s), Histoire d'air, Pierres, Filamants, Paradoxe de l´ange, J´ai baisé la bouche de l´aurore, Ithaques, Liseuse par-dessus les épaules, Le cercle des sorts, La bouche de l´ombre.

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He has given numerous public readings in France and abroad - mainly in libraries and cultural centres - and also recitals accompanied by musicians. An essay on his work, followed by several interviews, was published in 2001 by Chantal DANJOU under the titleJean - Claude VILLAIN, damier de silence et parole. Aspecial file on Jean - Claude VILLAIN was published by the Editions Encres Vives in 2003 and a CD rom in the collection "A poet, a day" (Itinéart Productions).