"Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire is the fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett's fifty-year engagement with the great French poet's life and work. Zone provides an exciting experience of the full range of Apollinaire's poetry, from his traditional lyric verse to his avant-garde calligrammatic pieces, from often-anthologized classics to hitherto-untranslated gems, from visionary poems of cosmic breadth to a poem about his shoes. This volume includes an introduction by Peter Read, the finest Apollinaire scholar in the English-speaking world, as well as a preface, helpful endnotes, and an annotated bibliography by Padgett. Each translation is accompanied by the original French text. There have been previous versions of Apollinaire, but this one is special, for it is not only a compact and judicious selection of the essential Apollinaire, it is also a feat of translation by an American poet about whom The Washington Post said, "No praise can be too high for Ron Padgett's translations.""--