"Richard Sieburth has performed a miracle of literary invention. He has made these poems sing."--Paul Auster

A forgotten masterpiece of French poetry, "Emblems of Desire" is a selection of 449 love poems first published in Lyons in 1544. Full of passionate ironies and charged obscurity, Maurice Sceve is considered a sixteenth-century Stephane Mallarme. His oblique self-portraiture laid the groundwork for many contemporary poets. Poet Michael Palmer calls Richard Sieburth "one of our finest living scholars and translators."

Maurice Sceve (c.1500-c.1564) was at the center of Lyonnese coterie that elaborated the theory of spiritual love.