Considered a modern landscape poet, Philippe Jaccottet's Beauregard is a set of five prose pieces, the first of which was inspired by the poet's chance discovery of a remote village near where he lived, in the Drôme, Southeast France, called Beauregard. His work is animated by a fascination with the visible world from which he translates visual objects into verbal images and ultimately into figures of language.

'Beauregard appeared in 1981, with Maeght, in Paris. It offers five short, intense, searchingly eloquent and, oddly, at once restive and serene proses with their various though overlapping reflections. Reflections upon catching sight, at the end of a winter's outing, of a small village, Beauregard, nestled against the mountains; upon the snow melting in March near Grignan, in the Drôme; upon April scapes of flowers, revealed earth, surging plants; upon a May meadow of tall grasses, the play of light upon the world, the dimming, falling dusk, the quiet traversal of anonymous, divine places emptied of their gods; upon the stunning and exhilarating experience of watching and hearing starlings as they swirl about, now smoke, now arrows, now clouds, now trailing banners, through the summer sky high above Jaccottet and a few friends. Such reflections, moreover, are quickly doubled, plunged into metaphoricity, partly recenterd or decentered as a metadisourse upon the problem of articulating this minimum. And all of this, discourse and metadiscourse, is hung about with the emblematic, delicate dream-like engravings of Zao Wou-Ki: forms and fadings, émergences and évanescences, presences that remain elusive, self-questioning, quasi-unreal'. Michael Bishop Jaccottet's Beauregard: 'Structure' and 'Deconstruction', Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 17, 1989, pp. 3-4