Unreconciled

This selection of poems chosen from four collections shines a fresh light on Michel Houellebecq and emphasises the radical singularity of his work. Drawing on similar themes to those of his novels, Unreconciled is a journey into the depths of individual experience and universal passions. This dual-language edition reveals Houellebecq’s experimentation with forms both ancient and new with texts in parallel. Divided into five parts, Unreconciled forms a narrative of love, hopelessness, catastrophe and, ultimately, redemption. In a world of supermarkets and public transport, Houellebecq manages to find traces of divine grace even as he exposes our inexorable decline into chaos. Told through forms and rhythms that are both ancient and new, with language steeped in the everyday, Houellebecq's vision of our era is one brimming with tensions that cannot - and will not - be reconciled.‘In his poetry Houellebecq presents the shocks and absurdities of modern life not casually but with beautiful formality, in alexandrines worthy of his beloved Lamartine, or quatrains as precise and irrefutably rhymed as those of A E Housman, charting what is not to be endured.’ – Evening Standard Arguably France’s most famous contemporary author, Michel Houellebecq’s writing is as controversial and radical as it is prophetic, relevant and highly praised. A poet, novelist and essayist his best-known works include Atomised, The Possibility of an Island, The Map and the Territory and Submission.