In his foreword to STONE LYRE, Nancy Naomi Carlson's previous collection of René Char translations, Ilya Kaminsky praised "the intensity, the dreamlike language, the gravity of tone, and the constant impression that one is reading not words in the language, but sparks of flames." STONE LYRE was a selection of poems from Char's numerous volumes; Carlson's new HAMMER WITH A NEW MASTER is a discrete and continuous work, the first English translation of Char's Le Marteau sans maître, first published in 1934 -- a time of rumbling menace that our era resembles.