This image is the cover for the book Le Contre-ciel, Tusk Ivories

Le Contre-ciel, Tusk Ivories

The author of Mount Analogue explores an uncharted path to the authentic self in this enlightening volume of poetic meditations.

For Rene Daumal, true living can only be experienced after the facade of self-identity has been stripped away through a kind of metaphysical suicide. As he states in the second poem of this collection, “The individual mind attains its absolute through successive negations. I am that which thinks, not that which is thought.”

In Le Contre-Ciel, Daumal invites his readers to venture with him on this Existential journey. Through philosophically contemplative poems, he acts as both chronicler and guide to the process of regeneration-through-negation in pursuit of genuine self-knowledge.

Rene Daumal

René Daumal (1908-44) was an editor of the French poetry and surrealist review Le Grand Jeu and received the Jacques Doucet Prize for his first volume of poetry, Le Contre-Ciel. Mount Analogue was first published, posthumously, in 1952.

The Overlook Press