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the complete review - poetry

At the Louvre

edited by
Antoine Caro, Edwin Frank, and Donatien Grau

general information | review summaries | our review | links

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Our Assessment:

B+ : many, many voices and takes; an appealing collection overall

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "A deux pas du musée on trouvait tout à la vieille Samaritaine, et là c’est un peu pareil. (...) Comme au musée on jette un coup d’œil ici, on s’arrête longuement là. Des souvenirs de visites anciennes remontent. Peut-on encore se perdre au Louvre ?" - Frédérique Fanchette, Libération

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       At the Louvre is described (in the flap-copy) as a: "unique collaboration between New York Review Books and the Louvre Museum [...] a hundred poems, newly commissioned exclusively for this volume". Poets were apparently asked to write something Louvre-related or -inspired and they obliged, taking a wide variety of approaches. The poems, which range from one to five pages in length -- though most are in the one to two page range --, are arranged alphabetically by author-last-name.
       The subtitle says that these are: Poems by 100 Contemporary World Poets but they're rounding down: in fact there are 102 (as is also acknowledged in Laurence des Cars' Foreword) -- while the French version does them even one better, with 103 poets represented. (It is Ariana Reines' contribution that didn't make the English-edition cut -- despite having been written in English; published as 'Zéro absolu' in the French edition, it is presumably the poem 'Absolute Zero', which you can, for example, find here.)
       While French- and English-language poets predominate, quite a bit of the poetry is translated from other languages -- poems originally written in a total of fifteen languages are collected here, by my count. It's a solid list of authors as well that includes quite a few very well-known poets, and even Nobel laureate Jon Fosse (probably not so well-known for his poetry). In not providing even the shortest of poet-biographies, however, the focus is decidedly on the poems (though oddly the table of contents lists only the author-names, and not the titles of the poems).
       The Louvre -- and its contents -- of course offer a great deal of material to work with: "more than a museum the Louvre / a city within a city", writes Vénus Khoury-Ghata, while Tahar Ben Jelloun goes so far as to say: "This museum is a country, homeland of tempests and light / A great motionless journey and, for all that, so alive" and Patrick Chamoiseau sees: "the Louvre as common-place of the world". Meanwhile, Amadou Lamine Sall suggests that: "When God goes on holiday, He takes up residence at the Louvre" -- and:

The Louvre is not a museum the Louvre is a tale of magic and awe
The perfect culmination of wonder before the prowess of the spirit of art ...

- M.A.Orthofer, 20 June 2025

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Links:

• New York Review Books publicity page
• Louvre publicity page
• Seghers publicity page
• Louvre -- official site

• Full Stop
• Hindustan Times
• Libération (French)

• See Index of Poetry
• See Index of Anthologies

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© 2025 the complete review

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