Les Pensées: The Thoughts of Lucienne Hollard McKay

She survived war when her family did not, battled for liberty with the

French Underground, and fell in love with an American doctor in Paris. And

throughout her too-short lifetime, she recorded her innermost thoughts and

impressions with intensely personal poems.

The daughter of a French physician, Lucienne Hollard McKay's poetry reflects

many of her thoughts, her moods, her intimations. In them one finds pain as

well as gaiety; and fantasy, delight, and ecstasy.

Tremendously personal, the poems are set down in the author's native French

and were never intended for publication.

To honor Lucienne's memory after her passing, her husband selected more than

fifty of these poems to share with the world. They appear herein, filled

with all the nuances and delicate iridescence of their original expression.

Translated with dedicated friendship by Lilian Polk, the English poems

appear side-by-side, next to the romantic language in which they were

created.

In these poems, daydreams commingle with reality, life and death are

interwoven, and always there is an ethereal beauty-even in the midst of

tragedy.

Lucienne Hollard knew the mighty and the lowly, enjoyed the society of the

famous, and worked closely with the nameless ones of the French Underground

during World War II. Everywhere her life took her, she remained a dauntless

spirit with an unbounded verve for whatever life brought. No other memorial

could conceivably preserve, as if still alive, the exquisite personality of

its author.