One of the current major French poets, Dominique Fourcade is a writer of witty, lyrically intense meditations on the self, art, poetry, and language in general: A weight/Inner/ This does not relate to an invisible wind/ This emanates from a being/ Life/ Sways like a January rose/ But why/ Do they. Sensitively translated by Robert Kocik, Xbo gradually reveals itself through its sequences as a portrait of the poet thoroughly engaged, mentally and sensually, in the world around him, a world in which the "word alone creates flesh..." An art scholar as well as poet, Fourcade is an authority on the work of Matisse, and is the author of several works of poetry, including Le ciel pas d'angle, rose-declic, Son blanc du un, and Outrance utterance et autres elegies.