The Poetry of Place: Lyric, Landscape, and Ideology in Renaissance France by Louisa Mackenzie

Reviews 235 novelist and activist David Grossman), papers were generally shorter than those of their academic counterparts, and more general in scope. Some were quite formal and others resembled a one-sided conversation. Rather than attempt a putatively profound analysis of the nature of fiction, most of the papers appeared to celebrate what novels can do, along with the usual complaints about the difficulty of writing. Currently in Europe, meetings such as the Assises are in vogue (cf. the International Literary Festival Berlin), if this is indeed a trend, it is a positive one. The Villa Gillet meeting did not concentrate exclusively on the French novel; it was international in scope,and attempted to bring together artists and their audiences from all over the world.This seems to indicate a renewed interest in contemporary writing, not necessarily in terms of influence, but more simply with regard to the problems artists encounter and the techniques and tricks they employ to overcome them. Also, if the word “roman” appears in the conference title, the emphasis was really on creative expression, thus allowing artists other than novelists to participate and share their sense of what they do. To a greater degree than I have witnessed in more academic meetings,the Assises represent very much a work in progress. As is the case with all such gatherings, contributions are uneven. The strength is largely in the presentations by the less well-known participants,although Finkielkraut said some moving things about the stress which has accompanied his writing and speaking throughout his career. Ultimately the value of these proceedings has less to do with the particular presentations than with the renewed confidence in contemporary literature this volume conveys. Florida State University William Cloonan Mackenzie, Louisa. The Poetry of Place: Lyric, Landscape, and Ideology in Renaissance France. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4426-4239-3. Pp. ix + 324. $65. This well-researched,exquisitely argued study explores the dialogue between poetry and landscape during the French Renaissance. Mackenzie rightly insists on the bidirectionality of this dialogue by demonstrating how poetry and place shaped and responded to each other through a shared concern with the complex interplay between the imagined and the real that made them fitting partners. As the first chapter of the book illustrates, this partnership could be quite literal. Here, Mackenzie explores the close collaboration, heretofore largely overlooked, between sixteenth-century mapmakers and poets. Both sought to navigate the tension between regional and national identity while drawing upon and moving beyond the topoi furnished by their classical models.Mackenzie provides precise examples of the productive interdependence between cartography and poetry through a spatially-oriented rereading of Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse and a fascinating description of the central role played by the royal cosmographer, Nicolas de Nicolay, in the poetic production of Ronsard and Baïf. The following chapters provide readings of the Pléiade’s poetic production that move seamlessly from landscape to poem and back again. Mackenzie’s reconsideration of Du Bellay’s L’Olive shows how the poet hijacks the Petrarchan love lyric in order to celebrate the rivers of his Angevine homeland. In the later Regrets, however , the poet translates the trauma of the Roman landscape as well as the mundane economic concerns facing him upon his return to France into a volume documenting the limits of idealization. Mackenzie shows that the poets Pontus de Tyard and Belleau were similarly conscious of the gap between ideal and real, and emphasized the constructed nature of their poetic landscapes in order to point to the impossibility of achieving pastoral, classical peace in their world. In the fifth chapter, Mackenzie calls attention to growing environmental threats to the French landscape during this period, suggesting that the Pléiade poets addressed the alarming problems of water pollution and deforestation.Her fascinating examination of Ronsard’s complex relation to Bernard Palissy, a self-made Protestant who recommended the cutting of trees as a means of increasing national wealth, sheds new light on the poet’s blend of nostalgia and selfglorification . In the sixth and final chapter, Mackenzie examines Vauquelin’s Foresteries and Jacques Peletier’s La Savoye...

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