Philippe Jaccottet was born in Lausanne in 1925 and has lived for many years in Provence. Words in the Air is excerpted from Mahon's Viking/Penguin Philippe Jaccottet: Selected Poems, awarded the C.K. Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize in 1989 and now out of print.

Derek Mahon writes in his introduction 'Jaccottet's poems take place, characteristically, in the absence of most other noise; but in the tentative birdsong, running water and rustling leaves of his landscape one hears an enchantment, what used to be called the music of the spheres.'