Kitten on the Keys

Poet Jean Cocteau gave it as his considered opinion that she was not a little girl but "an 80-year-old dwarf." A critic in Le Figaro said that her lines sparkled "with spontaneous sensations, new tingling images." Elle, France's biggest women's weekly, denounced her as a fake. They were all talking about nine-year-old Minou Drouet, whose poems launched a major cultural rhubarb in Paris (TIME, Nov. 28, 1955). Since then, Minou (a French pet name for "kitten") has fought back. When a critic sniffed that she should go back to her dolls, Minou answered: "Dolls are the dead. Have I no more to do here on earth?" More important in her defense was a test for membership in France's Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers. Put alone in a room and given several topics, Minou emerged in 25 minutes with a creditable 38-line poem, Paris Sky. She duplicated the feat on television last month by dashing off a 46-liner called London. Sample verses:

Mischievous country where in the morning

All pink and golden on a plate

Two eggs sing duets as they lie in wait . . .

English-speaking readers now have a chance to see what the controversy was about, with the publication in Britain of Minou's First Poems, translated by Poet-Biographer Margaret Crosland (Hamish Hamilton, London). There is nothing in the 20 poems to suggest that they could not have been written by a very precocious child, and at the same time nothing to keep them from being judged as poetry rather than child's play. The verses are set in the serpentine typography that Minou believes necessary because "I reread better written like this." Typical was Tree that I Love:

Tree

drawn by a clumsy child

a child too poor to buy

coloured chalks who scribbled you with the brown left over from his maps at school.

Tree I come to you console me for being only me.

There is in most of the poems an agreeable fondness for nature, dogs and music, and a great addiction to.what critics call the pathetic fallacy--the giving of human traits or feelings to inanimate objects. The poorest have the quality of a grownup reaching too far for effect ("this little incinerator of so many lost dreams that is called ash-tray"), and a weakness for the repeated metaphor that finds nights, houses, clouds and tears all to be the color of blood. Yet the best are written with undeniable charm, and in much the same headlong fashion that a child runs:

White road, where are you going?

You are only an arm stretched out, an outstretched arm that bids me go close, and closer yet to the bracelet that the moss-bearded bridge slips over your wrist.

This week, Minou was back in Paris after a triumphal tour of Switzerland and Italy. Along the way, she had been the star of a poetry festival in Taormina and had an audience with the Pope. Said Minou to His Holiness: "I have gone into many churches looking for God, but all I find are stained-glass windows and pillars." It is not recorded what the Pope replied to this, but later he asked the poet for a copy of her book. Whereupon Minou asked archly, "Haven't you read it yet?", and promised to send him one.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.