When, in 1999, a small book of poems entitled Pas revoir was published, the often hermetic world of French poetry received a jolt. Here was the shock of an authentically new voice, which, in its urgent, stammered cadences and its amalgam of neologism and colloquial argot, joined together the emotions and vocabularies of an adult – and the little girl she used to be – in a lament for her dead father. The poet intertwining these voices was a young woman in her early thirties called Valérie Rouzeau. Utterly unacademic, Rouzeau’s poetry draws deep on a tradition of popular poetry in France that includes such major figures as Apollinaire, Queneau, Desnos and Prévert and which is unafraid to experiment with the pun, the neologism, and even with a kind of child’s babil. This is something Rouzeau has made especially her own, and in her later poetry (especially in the major collections Va où and Quand je me deux) it has become a finely modulated musical resource.