L’Adoption du système métrique

One of thirty copies on pure vellum, the only large paper.

This collection brings together poems written (or which sometimes resolved to be written) during a period of five years. It would have been possible to group them by theme, like so many clubs where elegiac or speculative, itinerant or nostalgic, anecdotal, frivolous would have met among themselves... But, most often, these themes, the poems mix them - and each has its own opinion. They were therefore left in their disorder, that is to say in the chronological order in which they appeared. Their unity doubtless lies in this persevering adoption of a system which has governed the poem in French verse for a millennium, like a driving principle and prior to what we call inspiration, mystery, poetry.

Jacques Reda

Born in 1929, a poet and critic with an abundant and varied body of work, nourished by his love of science, jazz and urban toponymy (and a thousand other things), he was a reader and then editor at Gallimard from 1975 and a member of the reading committee from 1983, as well as editor-in-chief of La Nouvelle Revue française from September 1987 to December 1995.
Through his works and the attention he never ceased to pay to other writers of his time, this man of magazines, a great admirer of Charles-Albert Cingria, demonstrated his attachment to a creative literature that knew how to keep all its promises of expression and human truth, without ever losing its connection with the reader, nature and the world as it is.
Awarded the Grand Prix de poésie de l'Académie française in 1997, he published most of his work with Éditions Gallimard after it was included in the collection "Le Chemin" by Georges Lambrichs in 1968 ( Amen ).