The work of Louis-René des Forêts, exemplary in its global austerity, its obsessive but lucid preoccupations, its aesthetically attuned yet unpretentious manner, had received only intermittent, if at times privileged attention until Yves Bonnefoy's subtle and penetrating analyses appeared recently in the Nouvelle Revue Française. Des Forêts' poetics emerges today as at once existentially and aesthetically challenging, contestatory, bleak some would argue, and yet recuperative, resilient, intuitively alert to states of being our century, and even his own work, can find difficult to...