Title: Piranesi
First published: 1993
Description: The formidable French poet and publisher Pierre Seghers (1906-1987) published subversively throughout the Nazi Occupation, narrowly escaping arrest for his Resistance work on several occasions, before eventually playing a part in the liberation of Paris.

His writing is itself resistance, resistance to the threat - and the temptation - of silence, immobility and resignation. Full of questions which paradoxically affirm the fragility and toughness of the human spirit (which is equally capable of creation and destruction, heroism and evil) his is a poetry of movement and change, of light brought into labyrinthine dark places.

Nowhere are these qualities more evident than in this masterful suite of poems, Piranesi, inspired by the nightmare prison landscape of the eighteenth-century Italian engraver's Carceri series. Marked deeply by Seghers' own wartime experiences and the subsequent discoveries of the Nazi concentration camps, the poems mirror the engravings in both content and expression, with their shifting perspectives and mysterious emblems.

As cryptic as the Carceri, the suite is both a universal meditation on human genius, and a private, coded love poem, written for the woman Seghers feared he might never be able to marry.
LC classification: PQ2637.E334 P5713 1993