The Digamma offers Yves Bonnefoy's signature style of simple but powerful language with fresh new grace. As a leading translator of Shakespeare in France, Bonnefoy's fascination with the playwright is displayed in the poems 'God in Hamlet' and 'For a Staging of Othello'. The collection also includes haunting reflections on children, nature, the origins of art, and vanished cultures. A key passage of the title piece of the book depicts the figures of Nicolas Poussin's The Shepherds of Arcadia, a reference that serves to ground the text in the lost civilizations of antiquity. Subtly, it brings out the underlying theme of the entire collection: in the ambivalent world we inhabit, being and non-being are fundamentally one.