Hammer with No Master

In his foreword to Stone Lyre, Nancy Naomi Carlsons previous collection of Ren Char translations, Ilya Kaminsky praised the intensity, the dream-like language, the gravity of tone, and the constant impression that one is reading not words in the language, but sparks of flames. Stone Lyre was a selection of poems from Chars numerous volumes of poems; Carlsons new Hammer with No Master is a discrete and continuous work, the first English translation of Chars Le marteau sans matre, first published in 1934 a time of rumbling menace that our time resembles.