Most of the texts by Eugène Savitzkaya are labelled as ‘novels’, but all of his work – prose, poetry, plays and essays – testify to the poetic glow in which he sees and describes everyday life. The celebration of ‘everyday miracles’, once a leitmotif of the Surrealists, acquires an unobtrusive but extremely personal interpretation in Savitzkaya’s work. His often fragmentary, repetitive “word machines” have nothing psychologising or cerebral about them. Savitzkaya is a poet of the open air, of the painstaking, even delirious observation. His “grating, sputtering, jingling” language aims to “do justice to the air, the wind, and the situation there and now”. With a sometimes sombre, sometimes intimate, but always sensual voice, he sings of metamorphosis, of unity and dissolution. The world appears to him as a garden in which everything and everyone – plants, insects and people – are doomed to change, to melt away and disappear. “You are beautiful as/ something that withers and/ falls to the ground, he once/ dared to say,” writes Savitzkaya in Nouba.