Paris

"Paris: Genesis of a Muse" is the tenth book of lyrical poetry that Little Red Tree Publishing has published in as many years. In this book Jean-Yves has taken the opportunity to tentatively explore the subject of the genesis of his own muse. The title is therefore both a literal and a provocative ghost, in so many ways. So we are left searching for a response to the intriguing question: Who or What is this muse, or more specifically how Paris became the genesis...?

Having been born outside of France with a soul that is as one with the desert (Maghreb) of North West Africa, Jean-Yves is magnetically drawn to the epicenter of French culture and the density of its history. To be inextricably linked but essentially an observer might be the genesis, whether this is the thought or the physical touch of grains of sand passing through young fingers, or the thought of the profound secular world of Moulin Rouge at the bottom of the Montmartre hill so close to the Catholic Basilica, or indeed the flawed but still compelling pastiche of Parisian life and French Morocco, or the existentialist vision of Sartre's concept of the absurdity, where exquisite beauty exists in the same space and time as unspeakable disaster... And, one cannot wander too far from the influence of Camus, which invades the very essence of Jean-Yves.