Manson reveals English words hiding within the original French text of Mallarme's poems. These pages are strewn with shreds of words: unevenly dispersed, semantically uncomfortable in each other's company, they stumble together to make momentary meaning before drifting apart on the white space of the page.

Poetry. Translated from the French by Peter Manson. THE POEMS IN VERSE is Peter Manson's translation of The Po&#233sies of St&#233phane Mallarm&#233. Long overshadowed by Mallarmé's theoretical writings and by his legendary visual poem "Un coup de D&#233s jamais n'abolira le Hasard," the Po&#233sies are lyrics of a uniquely prescient and generative modernity. Grounded in a scrupulous sounding of the complex ambiguities of the original poems, Manson's English translations draw on the resources of the most innovative poetries of our own time--these may be the first translations really to trust the English language to bear the full weight of Mallarm&#233an complexity. With THE POEMS IN VERSE, Mallarmé's voice is at last brought back, with all its incisive strangeness, into the conversation it started a hundred and fifty years ago, called contemporary poetry.