One of the foremost poets of the French Resistance, Rene Char has been hailed by Donald Revell as the conscience of modern French poetry. Translated by Mark Hutchinson, "The Inventors" is a companion volume to Char s critically acclaimed "Hypnos." It gathers more than forty poems that represent a cross-section of Char s mature work, spanning from 1936 to 1988. All three genres of Char s work are represented here: verse poems, prose poems, and the abrupt, lapidary propositions for which he is best known. These "maxima sententia" combine the terseness of La Rochefoucauld with the probing and...