The bizarre neglect, even in his own country, of this great poet, is outrageous, especially considering his influence on modern poetry in the shape of Laforgue, Eliot and Pound. I can find no edition of his work here, and must be contented with extracts in William Rees' Penguin anthology of French poetry. In a lifetime blighted by ill-health, poverty and alienating rebellion (he was one of Verlaine's original poets maudit), he only published one volume of poetry.

Although staying largely within conventional forms, Corbiere's poetry push these to breaking point, with the violent, phlegmatic language, frequently obscure imagery, hallucinatory, stuttering rhythms, and broken metre. His 'Litany of Sleep' was acclaimed by Surrealists, - it is a compelling barrage of variations on its titular theme, suggesting sleep as a nightmare, fertile flipside to bourgeois normality. Other poems range form the gunkily self-lacerating 'The Toad' and self-negating 'Epitaph' to the bleak, not-so-fantastical wasteland of 'Evil Landscape'.

Mitchell does an excellent job of entangling Corbiere's briary method, and revealing the artistry behind the very difficult, seemingly unyielding voice. His discussion of the Tristan persona and ironic techniques suggest, to me at least, that Corbiere uncannily foreshadowed the procedures of Nabokov, although I haven't come across any references to him in literature on the Russian.

In the absence of an available edition, Mitchell contains generous excerpts from Corbiere's work, and, unlike most English studies of French literature, he does not disdain the non-French speaking reader. Sometimes he protests too much, going round in circles and repeating himself; mostly though, this is an excellent and thorough piece of proselysation that unfortunately failed in its aim to place Corbiere at the forefront of modern poets.