Guillaume Apollinaire's Little Auto

Guillaume Apollinaire – whose writings ranged from plays to experimental poetry, from art criticism to erotica – was at the heart of literary and artistic life in early 20th-century Paris. Both his work and his flamboyant personality had a defining influence on the development of Surrealism, Dadaism and other artistic movements. In late 1914 Apollinaire swapped the high life of avant-garde Paris for the mud and desolation of war in the trenches. But his poems of this period are wholly different from those that for English readers have come to define the genre of war poetry: exploding shells are compared to champagne bottles, and juxtaposed with the orgy of destruction are nostalgia for antiquity, impatience for the future, melancholy and exuberance. Apollinaire died in 1918. The new translations in this bilingual edition, entitled The Little Auto comprise mostly poems written after 1914, but include ‘Zone’ (in the first English version since Samuel Beckett’s to match the original’s use of rhyme) and some other pre-war poems. A century later, they remain as daring and alive as when they were written. [purchase]

Benjamin Péret's Leg of Lamb

Benjamin Péret was a founding member of surrealism, a card carrying surrealist - if there ever was such a thing - and he was Salvador Dali's favorite poet; as well as a revolutionary and a rabble rouser who stirred the pot of literary movements as well as political ones. Péret, like his writing, led an almost automatic life. Entering world war one in order to avoid persecution for defacing a statue and whilst in a fox hole one day he discovers the writings of Dadaist Guillaume Apollinaire - a Dadaist poet who coined the word surrealism.  After the war Péret found his way in to the heart of the burgeoning surrealist movement and subsequently into the heart of its founder Andre Breton.  The surrealists found it best to stay close in the early years of its founding in order to protect their brilliant, insane, and sometimes infantile visions of the world - a vision that if proclaimed by a solitary person would most likely lead to confinement for insanity  in a world that saw if perfectly fine without all the sliced eyeballs and flying tigers.

“...a smorgasbord of automatic writing.”

But Benjamin Péret was one of the only surrealists, beside Andre Breton, who stayed a surrealist even after the mirage wore off.  Péret's Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works, which is available now on Wakefield Press, is a "foundational classic of Surrealist literature."  Almost entirely written in the 1920s,  Leg of Lamb is a collection of brilliant, absurdist visions - twenty-four narratives in short prose  - a "smorgasbord of automatic writing."  Visit the the Wakfield Press website and pick up a copy for your collection - its a must for your library.  www.wakefieldpress.com