In his foreword to Stone Lyre, Nancy Naomi Carlson¿s previous collection of Ren¿har translations, Ilya Kaminsky praised ¿the intensity, the dream-like 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 of poems; Carlson¿s new Hammer with No Master is a discrete and continuous work, the first English translation of Char¿s Le marteau sans ma¿e, first published in 1934 ¿ a time of rumbling menace that our time resembles.