Craft: Joyce Mansour

Joyce Mansour (born Joyce Patricia Adès, 1928—1986) was a Syrian Jewish poet from England and a native English speaker, but she wrote in French. Though part of a larger group of Surrealist artists like Roberto Matta, Wilfredo Lam, Pierre Alechinsky, and André Breton, Mansour (rhymes with blur) is not even well-known in French literature.

Mansour’s poetry is best categorized as erotic, Surrealist, passionate, but with an attention to death which is around the corner. Her work is framed, too, by two catastrophic events: her mother’s death when she was 15 and her husband’s death of cancer after they had been married only six months when she was 18 and he was 21. Her first book, Cris (Screams in English), came out in 1953 and her last, Trous Noirs (or Black Holes) in 1986.