On the occasion of her 80th birthday, the journal Yanam , the English

Department of Strasbourg University, the members of the research groups

'Recherches sur le monde anglophone' and 'Linguistique, langue, parole',

suggested publishing a selection of their colleague Jean Paira-Pemberton's

poems. The present volume brings together over a hundred poems in

chronological order, almost all previously unpublished. As one can imagine,

the selection out of the mass produced over the period has been no easy task

for the author.

It represents a summing-up of emotions and experiences between 1955 and

2009 by someone for whom poetry was a vital necessity like breathing, eating

or drinking. Someone who says in "A poet's autobiography" that as a child she

"could think of nothing more normal to be, than a poet".

[...] Taking up a favourite image of hers, stones and the mineral, these poems

are like pieces of amber, fragments of a life coagulated in resin, brief moments

of happiness, deep sufferings, brilliant or derisory epiphanies [...]

Albert Hamm