The Blue Tales of Wine by Jean-Claude Pirotte - Chronicles and Poetry (French Edition)

"The Blue Tales of Wine" and "A Dream in Lotharingia" are the notebooks of a passionate observer, an intimate journal poetry, the ephemerides of a wandering heart that loves to lose itself in territories away from busy paths, towards secret corners not listed by tourist offices: "The least loved countries are the dearest to my soul." Signe distinctive of all great poetry, there exists a Pirotte universe, a whole world of unexpected diversities, majestic avenues and secret twists, heroic solemnities and popular veins, mythical alluviums... a constant vigilance of the mind and heart, a universe where the boundaries between reality and imagination, between dream and life, blur and disappear.

The author:

Born in Namur in 1939, Jean-Claude Pirotte spent his adolescence in Wallonia, Holland, and Burgundy. A lawyer for eleven years, he began in 1975 a "more or less vagabond and clandestine existence in the French province" which he deeply loves. Poet, novelist, chronicler, publisher, but also painter, Jean-Claude Pirotte is the author of about thirty works including La pluie à Rethel, Un été dans la combe, Une adolescence en Gueldre, Absent de Bagdad (La Table Ronde), La vallée de Misère, Sarah feuille morte, L’épreuve du jour, Revermont, Autres séjours published by Le temps qu’il fait.

Excerpt:

Abysses

I speak to you of the Abysses of Nyans. Dante, no doubt, dreamed of this landscape, in the troubled autumn. On the walls, the snow is already clinging. From the collapsed mountain seems to spring a great wind that creaks and swirls. The Abysses demand from man a harsher language, a rougher thought. It seems that death watches between the sides of immense fallen rocks. It seems that death watches over the depressed plateau that the withered vines, deprived of their last russet glow, obstinately inhabit in the dread of the coming winter. I speak to you of the Abysses. I speak to you of a hell without flames, an icy hell, that the lean and dry man wrests from age to age from his hellish nature. I speak to you pompously of the Abysses. For this land balances between pomp and silence, between rigor and dishevelment. This is the gate of exile, the east of Eden, but the tenacious memory of Eden, one would indeed believe that this memory alone inspires the sap with the cycles of its momentum. The altesse and the chasselas, the jacquère and the mondeuse blanche, the petite-sainte-Marie and the gringet defy the mountain. And they say that the altesse was brought back from Cyprus by a Crusader, who planted it in the roughest and most arid soil, at the heart of the chaos, by the grace of the god whose cross he bore. And the altesse gave the liveliest and most fruity white wine, to mock the devil who shook the mountain. Since then, the roussette of Savoy makes the girls who mock the devil dance, and it is said, on ball and stormy nights, that the powerless devil cries and begs for a glass of fresh wine from the Abysses.

Information:

• Format: Paperback
• EAN13: 9782868535566
• ISBN: 978-2-86853-556-6
• Publisher: Le Temps qu'il fait
• Publication date: 06/06/2011
• Collection: Literature
• Number of pages: 160
• Dimensions: 18 x 12 cm
• Weight: 156 g
• Language: French