On the Streets of Paris

Born in Paris and now living in the UK, Clémentine Beauvais has penned eighteen poems as an appreciation of her home city, ‘The City of Light’ as she calls it in her introduction. Readers first encounter it via the Eiffel Tower, one of her playful poems, wherein the tower is accused of playing hide-and-seek: ‘trickster tower jungle gym for clouds / tourist monkey puzzle cheeky queen / count to ten and you’ll be gone again.’

Next, readers are taught the rule for buying a baguette – ‘If you buy the baguette / the rule is you get / to eat just a bit, / just the tip, on the way home.’

Then comes Gare du Nord. (I wonder why this isn’t placed at the start of the book) ‘Thrumming with trains announcements whistles beeping/ throngs of tourists travellers loiterers barterers/ public piano players luggage luggers’. One cannot help but feel the atmosphere of the station.
Thereafter we’re introduced to some likely stopping places including one of the Bouquinistes, described as ‘A bottle-green tortoise treasure chest / kept by a windswept, street-sure bookseller, / propped against the parapet along the Seine; / its shell pops open at the first rays of sun.’ Another is the Wallace Fountains, just the spot to quench your thirst on a hot summer day. More serious and reflective is the tribute to an Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe that begins, ‘Lying there for us all, he stands for them all / and he stands for the lies that were told / when they took all the boys from their toys,’

Historical and informative both, is the author’s tour. I’d never before heard of 21 June, Music Day, a relatively recent tradition that began in the 1980s. Every poem is complemented by a gouache painting by Seula Yi that is rather similar in style to travel posters from the early twentieth century and there’s a final double spread entitled Paris Snapshots, each with interesting facts and a Did you know?