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when gertrude married alice poetry chapbook looks back at Paris in the 1920s and 30s
By Gabriel Miller
Library Communications
Posted 7/26/2004
MADISON, Wis. -- In her poetry collection when gertrude married alice, Eve Robillard evokes Paris between the World Wars through the lives of expatriate artists and writers. This latest release from the UW–Madison Libraries' Parallel Press draws on the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, as well as the work of Joyce, Rodin, Picasso and others, to playfully recreate a city filled with fleeting memories and historical musings.
Yet the life of Sylvia Beach and her bookstore Shakespeare & Company emerge as the backdrop upon which many of these memories and musings are played out. Her poems "Photographer Unknown" and "Shakespeare & Company Vanishes" beautifully capture the euphoria and uncertainty of a city on the cusp of artistic discovery and under the shadow of Nazi occupation.
"The city of Paris speaks to my imagination in so many ways; as do women like Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Sylvia Beach and the way Paris influenced them and the influence they had on those artists and writers who lived there. These women lived fascinating lives long before the feminist movement of the 1960s," Robillard says.
The sixteen-poem collection was published as a chapbook, a small format work usually reserved for poetry and essays that employs a straight-forward design. when gertrude married alice is the 32nd chapbook published by the Parallel Press, an imprint of the UW–Madison Libraries.
Robillard's interest in all things French can be traced back to her family history; her great-grandfather (seven times removed) was sent from an orphanage in Paris to Canada during the reign of Louis XIV. A former writing teacher at UW–Green Bay, Robillard is currently a children's librarian at Middleton Public Library.
Her poetry has appeared in Monserrat Review, Madison Review, Wisconsin Poets at the Elvehjem, Chicago’s Midway Review, Great River Review, Sheepshead Review, A Room of One’s Own Anthology, Wisconsin Academy Review and other publications.
when gertrude married alice and other Parallel Press chapbooks may be purchased for $10 each or $50 for six. For more information, visit: http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry/.Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
E-mail: parallelpress@library.wisc.edu.
From when gertrude married alice:
“Shakespeare & Company Vanishes”
(Adapted from the Memoirs of Sylvia Beach)
Then he came in, speaking perfect English.
That copy of Finnegan’s Wake in the window—
I will have it, please.
It’s not for sale.
Why not.
It’s the last one I have. Out
he strode, trembling
with rage. My men will be coming
to confiscate your good. We carried
the books upstairs, and all the furniture.
I had a carpenter take down the shelves
and someone painted out the name Shakespeare
& Company. The Germans never
found the shop, though eventually
they did find the proprietor.
