Claude Esteban

Esteban, Claude ( b. 1935). French poet, a pithy, icily minimal stylist whose poems evoke empty spaces and anxieties, ‘à mi-chemin de l'être | et de l'oubli’. From Terres, travaux du cœur (1979) to Le Nom et la demeure (1985) he inches, as if reluctantly, towards the fervency which floods his essays on favourite poets in Critique de la raison poétique (1987). A sensitive translator from the Spanish, he has also written a monograph on the sculptor Chillida (1972).

[Roger Cardinal]