First known for his war-time poems written from a German labour camp − notably his sombre reworkings of the myth of the Magi - André Frénaud (1907-1993) is one of the most searching of French poets. His work is structured by a sense of quest, which gives it its labyrinthine patterns, underground tensions and fractured, inventive forms. His poetry has an epic and tragic dimension: spurred by an urge for transcendence, it refuses false paradises, arrivals and notions of reconciliation.
