In his foreword to Stone Lyre, Nancy Naomi Carlson’s previous collection of René 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 Char’s numerous volumes of poems; Carlson’s new Hammer with No Master is a discrete and continuous work, the first English translation of Char’s Le marteau sans maître, first published in 1934 — a time of rumbling menace that our time resembles.

René Char (1907–1988) was one of the most consequential poets of the twentieth century. A leader in the underground French Resistance during World War Two, later he was an ardent opponent of nuclear technology. His poetry confronts the moral, political, and artistic challenges of modernity with a prophetic eloquence comparable to the poet-philosophers of ancient Greece.

Nancy Naomi Carlson is author of three poetry collections and translator of Stone Lyre: Poems of René Char (Tupelo, 2010), Martiniquan poet Suzanne Dracius’s Calazaza’s Delicious Dereliction (Tupelo 2015), and Djiboutian poet Abdourahman A. Wabe’s The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper (Seagull, 2015), a shortlist finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. She teaches at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.