Georges Rodenbach was a leading literary figure during the epoch of symbolism in late nineteenth-century France and Belgium. This is the first-ever collection of Rodenbach's poetry to be published in English translation. He is most famous for his fin-de-sicle novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892), but it is in the lesser-known collections of poetry that his mystical articulation of the ambiance of a decaying Bruges reaches its zenith.It is no surprise that, after his premature death in 1898, Rodenbach's precise, poignant, delicate yet deceptively muscular poems attracted the likes of Rilke and Proust. These two exceptional diviners of the unacknowledged life secreted within objects and atmospheres, saw in him a fellow explorer, a wholly authentic and uncompromising voice, that articulated an interior landscape of the soul like no other.It is this voice
