Death of Stéphane Bouquet, poet of the “incompleteness of the world”

Stéphane Bouquet died on Sunday, August 24, and this sentence seems impossible as his poetry seems filled with "the cellular agitation of life." From book to book, a dozen, mainly published by Champ Vallon, he never ceased to celebrate "the fact of living" (the title of one of his most beautiful collections, published in 2021), giving voice to a singular voice that quickly became one of the most remarkable of his time. Movement, sensation, breath, rhythm above all, notably thanks to significant work on line breaks: his language reflects an attention to the intimate as well as to the world, to "abrupt pulsations, discontinuous leaps, appearances of moments, jerks of birds, and very often, more often, mad beats of boys," he lists in Un peuple (2007). An exaltation of life that was also a way of recalling its end. From his first book ( In the Year of This Age , 2001), he programmed: "I keep track, day by day, of death and how it progresses." Stéphane Bouquet leaves a work of rare coherence, concluded by what will be its final movement, the aptly named To