The most comprehensive Jacques Prevert sampler, covering the full range of his poetic works, in a fully dual language (French -English) format. Wonderfully translated by Norman R. Shapiro who has caught the full range of Prevert's irony, puns, and word play that has enchanted French readers throughout the 20th century. Jacques Prevert (1900-1977) was a poet and screenwriter who actively participated in the Surrealist movement as well as the Rue du Chateau group with Raymond Queneau and Marcel Duchamp. His poetry is taught in schools in France and his works appear in countless anthologies throughout the world. This comprehensive anthology, drawing from all time periods of his work, is the first in English to present a picture of the whole of Prevert's poetic achievement.

Focusing on the career of the surrealist poet Jacques Prevert, this book explores the stylistic and thematic currents that prevailed in French films of the 1930s. Prevert's involvement with the surrealists, his contribution to the avant-grade theatre company Groupe Octobre, and his unique collaboration with Marcel Carne are examined.

A wide-ranging study of Prévert’s promethean imagination and creativity in the interwoven realms of theatre, film, poetry, art, photography, and song, Michael Bishop’s Jacques Prévert seeks to demonstrate the originality of a genial fabricator of image and word whose essential focus, unpretentious yet urgently felt, unintellectualised yet buoyantly and wittily intelligent, ever remains the quality of our daily being-in-the-world, the possibility of our self-transformation, the stunning availability – should we truly will it, and despite all that can weigh upon existence, above all ideologically – of joy and love and freedom.

Jacques Prévert is a poetic icon in France today, his poems are part of the school curriculum. Given the poet's deliberate distance from high culture and notably from traditional school education, this is not devoid of irony. The present eBook sketches a portrait of the poet in five chapters. In each chapter, English adaptations of selected works by Prévert serve as an introduction to individual aspects of his work.