First known for his war-time poems written from a German labour camp – notably his sombre reworkings of the myth of the Magi – André Frénaud (1907-1993) is one of the most searching of French poets. His work is structured by a sense of quest, which gives it its labyrinthine patterns, underground tensions and fractured, inventive forms. His poetry has an epic and tragic dimension: spurred by an urge for transcendence, it refuses false paradises, arrivals and notions of reconciliation. Rome the Sorceress (1973) is Frénaud’s richest and most disturbing confrontation with the hidden life of myths and the sacred, probing the themes of time, inheritance, revolt, illusions of divinity, father-figures, mother-figures, and the insatiable monuments of language which pretend to grapple with this weight of experience. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.