Author photo copyright © Tony Frazer

Gustaf Sobin (1935–2005) was an American expatriate poet, long resident in Provence. He was born in Boston into a prosperous family, and graduated from Brown University in 1957. In 1962, he moved to France, meeting René Char in his first days in Paris, a poet whose work he greatly admired and whose poetry was to have a great influence on his own. It was Char who suggested that Sobin go to Provence, and go there he did, settling in a small hamlet in the Luberon, not far from Char’s home town. Thanks an inheritance, he was able to purchase an old silk cocoonery, and then to live frugally, while trying to find his way as a writer. In 1968 he married Susannah Bott, an English painter. For the rest of his life he and his family were to live in this old building, occasionally extended when the need arose. Sobin was eventually to build himself a small cabanon some 50 yards from the house, along a tree-lined path, where he could write, always standing up. It took some years before he was to find his poetic voice, and it was only in 1972 that he wrote what he considered to be his first poem, notwithstanding two chapbooks which had appeared in the 1960s. In the 1970s, his work was taken up by Eliot Weinberger’s pioneering magazine Montemora and Montemora went on to publish his first two collections, Wind Chrysalid’s Rattle and Celebration of the Sound Through . Later collections were published by New Directions and Talisman House. In his later years, Sobin also published four novels and a significant collection of essays on Provence.