In the poetic corpus of Yves Bonnefoy, the dynamic sense of place and spatial movement, of the very site of his celebrated Presence, has long animated the relationship of language to concrete form. Powerfully charged images of almost eerily three-dimensional force enliven Bonnefoy's textual spaces, as the pure, simple, plastic forms often of natural origin-the stone, the flame, the salamander-take on new potential for poetic meaning. Such images, punctuated by the brute elements of language, by a dialectical relationship between silence and the cry, establish an aesthetic realm grounded in mutability, contingence, and the protean shaping and reshaping of plastic form. In the quest for a truly authentic space for self expression and for the expression of poetic and philosophical inquiry, Bonnefoy's more recent work, as with his 1991 Début et fin de la neige, reflects an intuitive sense of the concrete nature of a visually grounded reality, an elusive tangibility subtly perceptible beyond the formal discursive and linguistic levels of his text.

Proceeded as it is by 13 other collections of verse, Neige has come to represent for many critics the coming of age of the poet Bonnefoy; yet it has also been suggested that the influence of other important poetic figures, notably Baudelaire and Saint-John Perse, strongly impacted the conceptual formulation of the collection. However, within this perspective, Neige can also be perceived as a work of difference, of distancing and distinction, surpassing in a subtle way the more conventional, more limited gestures of imitation or reaction that one poet might offer in homage to another. In fact, in the dynamic imagistic system proposed in Neige, it can be argued that despite the evident appreciation of these earlier poets, Bonnefoy articulates his own poetic schema in large part in artful opposition to the voices that came before him, as he communicates his cosmic vision through an appropriation, often in a paradoxical approach, of the forms of expression of the past. Further, while the collection can be seen to harken back to the philosophical and formal notions of such pillars of antiquity as Lucretius and Aristotle, Bonnefoy's own conception of modern poetry, at once pantheistic and linguistically self-conscious, creates a poetic mode distinctly his own.

In Neige, it is not a question of the idealization of the perfect pale expanse of a snow-covered scene, but rather the suggestion of snow as a truly natural element, physical material that bears the traces of human wandering, while it evokes an intimate response on the part of the reader who meets up with Bonnefoy's lyrical élan. The poet evokes the ephemeral yet very real whiteness of snow into a linguistically grounded conceptual space, and in a silent, meditative atmosphere, the natural signs of the physical world are transformed into objects of the poet's reflection, in an aesthetic gesture distinct from the Romantic or Symbolist modes, particularly through the perhaps misleadingly unadorned lexicon that masks an inventive discursive sophistication. Parallel to the play of the whiteness of the snow falling in the dark sky, and reminiscent of whirling stars and nebulae against the blackness of the void, the active nature of words on the page that contains them is resurrected, as the black ink treads across the white expanses of the page. Bonnefoy thus conjures up an imagistic space in which traditional poetic motifs-the beauty of nature, the wonder of infancy, the uncertainties of religion-find new significance, both semantic and symbolic, in a writing that explores its own difference from the tradition that engendered it, free in form and open to possibility. A tribute both to Bonnefoy's lyricism and to his lucidity, Neige enunciates its own space for expression unlike, in the end, any other.