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      • Sylvia Plath by Dr. Nidhi Mehta >
        • Chapter-1(Sylvia Plath)
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        • Chapter-4(Sylvia Plath)
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      • Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas >
        • Chapter-1(Rabindranath Tagore)
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      • Kazi Nazrul Islam by Dr. Shamenaz Shaikh >
        • Chapter 1(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 2(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 3(Nazrul Islam)
      • Kabir's Poetry by Dr. Anshu Pandey >
        • Chapter 1(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 2(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 3(Kabir's Poetry)
      • My mind's not right by Dr. Vicky Gilpin >
        • Chapter- 1 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-2 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-3 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-4 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
      • On Poetry & Poets by Abhay K.
      • Poetry of Kamla Das –A True Voice Of Bourgeoisie Women In India by Dr.Shikha Saxena
      • Identity Issues in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel by Dr.Arvind Nawale & Prashant Mothe*
      • Nissim Ezekiel’s Latter-Day Psalms: His Religious and Philosophical Speculations By Dr. Pallavi Srivastava
      • The Moping Owl : the Epitome of Melancholy by Zinia Mitra
      • Gary Soto’s Vision of Chicano Experiences: The Elements of San Joaquin and Human Nature by Paula Hayes
      • Sri Aurobindo: A Poet By Aju Mukhopadhyay
      • Wordsworthian Romanticism in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: Nature and the Reflective Capabilities of a Poetic Self by Paula Hayes
      • Reflective Journey of T.S. Eliot: From Philosophy to Poetry by Syed Ahmad Raza Abidi
      • North East Indian Poetry: ‘Peace’ in Violence by Ananya .S. Guha
    • 2014-2015 >
      • From The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry Adam Wyeth
      • Alchemy’s Drama: Conflict, Resolution and Poiesis in the Poetic Work of Art by Michelle Bitting
      • Amir Khushrau: The Musical Soul of India by Dr. Shamenaz
      • PUT YOUR HANDS ON ME: POETRY'S EROTIC ART by Elena Karina Byrne
      • Celtic and Urban Landscapes in Irish Poetry by Linda Ibbotson
      • Trickster at the African Crossroads and the Bridge to the Blues in America by Michelle Bitting
    • 2015-2016 >
      • Orogeny/Erogeny: The “nonsense” of language and the poetics of Ed Dorn T Thilleman
      • Erika Burkart: Fragments, Shards, and Visions by Marc Vincenz
      • English Women Poets and Indian politics
    • 2016-2017 >
      • Children’s Poetry in India- A Case Study of Adil Jussawalla and Ananya Guha by Shruti Sareen
      • Thirteen Thoughts on Poetry in the Digital Age by Mandy kAHN
    • 2017-2018 >
      • From Self-Portrait with Dogwood: A Route of Evanescence by Christopher Merrill
      • Impure Poetry by Tony Barnstone
      • On the Poets: Contributors in Context by Donald Gardner
      • Punching above its Weight: Dutch Poetry in English, a Selection, 2013-2017 by Jane Draycott
  • Print Editions

Julie Nice on Frédéric Jacques Temple

The life of Frédéric Jacques Temple is, so to speak, the purest image of the XXth century. He took part in many of its greatest and worst events, with an extraordinary sense of simplicity and humanity. He is a pioneer, an adventurer, a son, a father and a husband. The first time I met him was in 2013, when he was awarded the prestigious Prix Apollinaire. Last year, I asked the permission to visit him for my researches, and him and his wife Brigitte invited me at home. I will always remember the evening we spent together, the happiness that emanated from this place, the quietness and softness of the wind as we talked and kids dove into the swimming pool.

Frédéric Jacques Temple was born in 1921 in Montpellier, in the south of France, not far from the Mediterranean. In his childhood, which he describes in his prose and poetry, he used to go to the sea, he swam with dolphins - with which he “spoke a secret language, as old as the world is, born in those times when gods lived on earth” - , fished sharks, admired the multitude of birds among the trees. He discovered the limitless beauty of nature, before it was crushed by modernity and its own multitude of buildings and tourists. Reading Temple’s poems feels and sounds like opening a sensible encyclopedia. Stercorarius pomarinus, puffins, petrels, owls, cranes, kingfishers... The innumerable list of birds, in his poems, flying, chirping, tweeting and buzzing around him is, yet, a “terrible song of memory”; it is a lost Arcadia that reminds us of the fact that, in France and everywhere else, birds are disappearing, and skies are growing more and more silent. Through his words, and the hypnotizing amount of species - both flora and fauna - described, Frédéric Jacques Temple tries to save them, to carve them into the trunks that pages used to be. No rhymes in his poems, but the rhythm of these words, almost forgotten, neglected in some dictionary on a dusty shelf. Yet I saw a seven-year-old boy read these poems, and then discuss with the author about caracal caracal and the length of its ears…
    
    Is it in search of Arcadia that Temple travelled so many times ? He is an insatiable reader, and his childhood was crowded with Fenimore Cooper, Melville and Verne’s characters, Captain Ahab, Professor Aronnax, to whom he would “substitute” himself during his strolls, and whose existence he would never call into question. Temple visited, among other countries, Cuba, Marocco - where he worked as a journalist -, Russia, Brazil, Québec and the United States. He went there on the trail of “The American Poet”, saw Whitman’s house and waited for the osprey. He came back to France with American-Indian wisdoms and proverbs, and a new collection of poems,  “The song of horseshoe crabs”, dedicated to this ancestor, the immemorial witness he met on a beach. Has limulus polyphemus ever landed in Arcadia ?

Italy, from ashore, doubtlessly looked like Arcadia when, in 1944, Temple joined the Allied Forces and fought in Monte Cassino and on the road to San Romano. “One day, time stopped for me at the brink of battle and life. Since then, I have waited.” He was 23, and he lost most of his comrades there, and a part of his life. Because Frédéric Jacques Temple loves his neighbour as himself; and his neighbour Lawrence Durrell was his friend, in Occitania and in Greece. And so were Blaise Cendrars, Henry Miller, Richard Aldington, Alain Clément, Vincent Bioulès, Henk Breuker - with whom he created the review La Licorne (The Unicorn) -,  Emmanuel Fillot, Robert Sabatier, Robert Marteau... In 1998, with his wife Brigitte, he went back to Italy, and climbed, against the wind and torrential rain, up a hill called Spazzavento - “sweeping wind” in Italian - because he wanted to visit a friend’s grave on the centenary of his birth. Two years later, Temple told the story of his epic ascent in a short book - published by Jacques Brémond -, in memory of this Italian officer who, in 1944 in Naples, invited him to visit his Caprese villa during his leave. Shortly after, in the newspaper, Temple recognized in the Italian dandy officer the author Curzio Malaparte. They sent each other letters and books, and met again in Paris. Malaparte died in 1957, struck down after decades of pain caused by toxic gas he inhaled while fighting for France during World War One. His major books, Kaputt and La pelle, are accounts of the horrors of war. Born shortly after World War One, Temple also felt its horror within his family and homeland. Nature and innocence would soon be swept by Hitler and modernity, just like horseshoe crabs are by the tide.

Frédéric Jacques Temple is also a horseshoe crab. He has ten eyes, some through which he sees the end of the world and the cruelty of Man, and others with which he sees and memorises what is left, the beauties of the world, friendship, nature, love. Sight and writing combined, he gives us one of the purest expressions of contemporary poetry. He gives us hope, and the will to make it last, and ours.

“ Death, the only immortal,
I know that someday she will take me away.
I insurrect,
curse the lethal encounter,
insult the hideous black beast,
but do not waste life
and the least drop of its honey”

​

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  • Home
  • About Us
    • Contact
    • Media Coverages
    • Copyright Notice
    • VerseVille Blog
  • Submissions
    • Poetry and Essays Guidelines
    • Book Review Guidelines
    • Research Series Guidelines
  • Masthead
  • Editions
    • 2011 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XIV November 2011
    • 2012 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XV March 2012
      • ISSUE-XVI July 2012
      • ISSUE-XVII November 2012
    • 2013 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XVIII April 2013
      • ISSUE XIX November 2013
    • 2014 Issues >
      • ISSUE XX May 2014
    • 2015 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXI February 2015
      • Contemporary Indian English Poetry ISSUE XXII November 2015
    • 2016 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXIII August 2016
      • Poetry From Ireland ISSUE XXIV December 2016
    • 2017 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXV August 2017
      • ISSUE XXVI December 2017
    • 2018 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXVII July 2018
      • ISSUE XXVIII November 2018
    • 2019 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXIX July 2019
    • 2020 ISSUES >
      • Issue XXX February 2020
      • ISSUE XXXI December 2020
  • Collaborations
    • Macedonian Collaboration
    • Collaboration with Dutch Foundation for Literature
  • Interviews
  • Prose on Poetry and Poets
    • 2010-2013 >
      • Sylvia Plath by Dr. Nidhi Mehta >
        • Chapter-1(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-2(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-3(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-4(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-5(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-6(Sylvia Plath)
      • Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas >
        • Chapter-1(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-2(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-3(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-4(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-5(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-6(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-7(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-8(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-9(Rabindranath Tagore)
      • Kazi Nazrul Islam by Dr. Shamenaz Shaikh >
        • Chapter 1(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 2(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 3(Nazrul Islam)
      • Kabir's Poetry by Dr. Anshu Pandey >
        • Chapter 1(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 2(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 3(Kabir's Poetry)
      • My mind's not right by Dr. Vicky Gilpin >
        • Chapter- 1 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-2 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-3 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-4 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
      • On Poetry & Poets by Abhay K.
      • Poetry of Kamla Das –A True Voice Of Bourgeoisie Women In India by Dr.Shikha Saxena
      • Identity Issues in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel by Dr.Arvind Nawale & Prashant Mothe*
      • Nissim Ezekiel’s Latter-Day Psalms: His Religious and Philosophical Speculations By Dr. Pallavi Srivastava
      • The Moping Owl : the Epitome of Melancholy by Zinia Mitra
      • Gary Soto’s Vision of Chicano Experiences: The Elements of San Joaquin and Human Nature by Paula Hayes
      • Sri Aurobindo: A Poet By Aju Mukhopadhyay
      • Wordsworthian Romanticism in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: Nature and the Reflective Capabilities of a Poetic Self by Paula Hayes
      • Reflective Journey of T.S. Eliot: From Philosophy to Poetry by Syed Ahmad Raza Abidi
      • North East Indian Poetry: ‘Peace’ in Violence by Ananya .S. Guha
    • 2014-2015 >
      • From The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry Adam Wyeth
      • Alchemy’s Drama: Conflict, Resolution and Poiesis in the Poetic Work of Art by Michelle Bitting
      • Amir Khushrau: The Musical Soul of India by Dr. Shamenaz
      • PUT YOUR HANDS ON ME: POETRY'S EROTIC ART by Elena Karina Byrne
      • Celtic and Urban Landscapes in Irish Poetry by Linda Ibbotson
      • Trickster at the African Crossroads and the Bridge to the Blues in America by Michelle Bitting
    • 2015-2016 >
      • Orogeny/Erogeny: The “nonsense” of language and the poetics of Ed Dorn T Thilleman
      • Erika Burkart: Fragments, Shards, and Visions by Marc Vincenz
      • English Women Poets and Indian politics
    • 2016-2017 >
      • Children’s Poetry in India- A Case Study of Adil Jussawalla and Ananya Guha by Shruti Sareen
      • Thirteen Thoughts on Poetry in the Digital Age by Mandy kAHN
    • 2017-2018 >
      • From Self-Portrait with Dogwood: A Route of Evanescence by Christopher Merrill
      • Impure Poetry by Tony Barnstone
      • On the Poets: Contributors in Context by Donald Gardner
      • Punching above its Weight: Dutch Poetry in English, a Selection, 2013-2017 by Jane Draycott
  • Print Editions