There is no plural for Paris, though there are many of them (Wikipedia offers help—wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_(disambiguation)—for those who might get them confused). There’s a Paris in Ontario (voted “the Prettiest Little Town in Canada” by Harrowsmith Magazine in 2017), and more than twenty in the United States. The most famous of these (thanks to the 1984 Wim Wenders film) is Paris, Texas. I recently rewatched the film for the first time in decades, in a high-resolution restoration just released on Blu-ray and UHD by Criterion. In 4K resolution you really see the sweat-sheen and dust on Harry Dean Stanton’s road-weary face, and every filament of Nastassja Kinski’s hot pink mohair sweater is distinct. Colours pop, and when the camera frames those far horizons and the empty roads that head toward them, you understand immediately why American landscapes fascinated so many European filmmakers (Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point; Adlon’s Bagdad Cafe). Yet another Paris is Paris: A Poem, by Hope Mirrlees, which Faber recently republished to celebrate the centenary of this “daring and dynamic experimental long poem.” Virginia Woolf called it “obscure, indecent, and brilliant,” and a glance at the typography and layout shows why: words are set in ALL CAPS and in different type sizes; lines run vertically; a scrap of sheet music and bits of signage are embedded as fragments of “found poetry.” This was modernism, and very audacious for its day; the poem was written in the spring of 1919, immediately following WWI. Mirrlees, twenty-six years old, tried to capture her impressions of the streets of Paris by day and night. “The sky is apricot; / Against it there pass / Across the Pont Solférino / Fiacres and little people all black.” There’s a helpful foreword by Deborah Levy, an afterword by Sandeep Parmar and an extensive commentary—longer than the poem itself!—explaining references within the text. Delicious. —Michael Hayward

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