The Sunlit Hours

In 1891, Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren married artist Marthe Massin, and his love for her inspired his tenderest and most fervent works, starting with Les Heures Claires (1896), here in a new translation. "From this savage and passionate man one might have expected visionary, seething ecstasies, a tempestuous discharge of erotic feeling; but these books are a wonderful disappointment," wrote Stefan Zweig. "They are not spoken to the crowd, but to one woman only, and for that reason they are not spoken loudly, but with a voice subdued. ... And in truth, it is impossible to imagine anything more touching than the sight of this mighty fighter here lowering his resonant voice to the soft breathings of devotion.""How beautiful these poems are! ... These verses are genuflections, folded hands, love that by humility becomes religion." -Stefan Zweig

"Poems that are as simple as sunlight and as white as air." - The New York Times