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Book excerpt: Hard not to be florid about this book Devoured in snippets or read straight through. It presents amazing experiences and skills. Because Marc-Charles Nicolas has a brilliantly delicate appreciation for the idea of a sentence in a poem, the juxtapositions of segments in these pages appear essentially to construct entire topics for mediation. Examined along and the dawnings increase and multipy--- inspirations, love, feelings, locations, events hitherto isolated are now all hooks-and-eyes into each other. And because Marc-Charles gets his inspiration from the muse, you feel the exquisiteness and beauty buried in shattered phrases about the "universality of poetry." As a poet he belongs to a life larger than his own. The life of genuine things. And (One more performance worth a word): the poems in his book "Perfumed Paradise" are filled with aboutness'. Put together as they are, they're seen to abound with roots: their laughter or melancholy or ire has discernible reasons. The humanness of poem-writing as a hobby, the splendid unavoidability of it ---that is what this compilation brings together. But floridity was to be kept away. One cloudless day---pace the anti-sentimentalists: life is short I sat in the sun and by a Brook with a friend and passed pages of this manuscript from side to side, reading fragments aloud, laughing quietly or looking grave, occasionally thrilled and bemused. A while back, this was, yet I remember no happier afternoon. The poems were written originally in French 13 years ago in the year 1993, delicious remembrance - fantastic book! Virgo A. Bernice