The abbreviated evenings of early November, after the clocks are set back, have always struck me as intensely sad. For years I used to feel a certain mild outrage at this legislated dimming of our daytime. Walking home from work along Ninth Avenue I’d watch the last light fading over the Hudson and feel cheated. This wasn’t the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” that Keats and the other elegists of autumn had promised. Nor did reciting Rilke’s great autumn poem offer much comfort: “Lord it is time: Set your shadow on the sundials and on the meadows let the winds run loose.” Neither Rilke nor Keats had been cooped up in an office all day, only to step out into dank, premature darkness at quitting time.

French poets catch the season’s mood better. Verlaine wrote about “the long sobs of the violins of autumn” and how they hurt his heart. And it is a sob, with worse to come. The last time Paul Valery saw his friend and mentor Stephane Mallarme, it was in the fall and Mallarme, sensing that it would be their last meeting, remarked, “It’s the final cymbal clash of autumn on the earth.” Now this is just the sort of exquisitely turned parting shot which you might expect a poet like Mallarme to make. Still, there’s a truth beneath the polish: Autumn seems symphonic, even operatic, perhaps because it’s followed by the stunned silence of winter.

The contemporary poet Jacques Reda is a great sentinel of the seasons in the classic French manner. The leading jazz critic in France for many years, he manages to infuse his verse with the subtlest of syncopa tions. The combination of jazz with poetry is, of course, an old story.What makes Mr. Reda’s work stand out, however, is the seemingly effortless way in which he weds jazz rhythms to the classical French alexandrine, that time-honored line of 12 or 14 syllables governed by long-standing prosodic strictures. Mr. Reda imparts a startling swing to the stately measures once wielded by Racine and Lamartine.

This odd amalgamation gives Mr. Reda’s poems a deceptive lightness. His riffs – whether on the approach of autumn or a particular quartier of Paris – sweep us up in an unexpected and intricate music, and it’s only later, looking back, that we realize how strictly he has controlled his cadenzas. His poems have a spider’s web steeliness; they are alive to every nuance of the wind yet never compromise their underlying architecture.

Here’s how he opens “Fragment of Summers”:

Nothing in all the vastness of high summer but the trembling
Of rails under poppies, and the hen’s last rasp
From the depths of a blackening heat; nothing but
This quilted stillness and an exodus of cloud.

The translation I’ve quoted comes from a new version of Mr. Reda’s first three collections of poetry, which appeared between 1968 and 1972, now beautifully rendered by the poet Jennie Feldman under the title “Treading Lightly” (Anvil, 142 pages, $15.95). Ms. Feldman’s translation is a remarkable accomplishment. She has an uncanny knack of capturing the unusual music of the original, at once skittery and formal, and of transposing it into memorable English. Notice how delicately she modulates the cadences of the closing lines of “Amen”:

Where I kneel there is no faith or pride, nor hope,
But as through the eye that the moon opens under the night,
A return to the intangible land of origins,
Ash kissing ash as a calm wind gives its blessing.

Born in 1929, Mr. Reda has long been prominent in the Parisian world of letters as an editor; he headed the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Francaise for several years. Because he wears so many different berets – poet, “jazziste,” city chronicler, essayist, critic – he is an oddly elusive presence on the rigidly stratified French scene.

As Ms. Feldman notes in her affectionate introduction, he is perhaps best typed as that quintessentially Parisian figure, the flaneur. The term has become a bit too trendy of late, thanks largely to the influence of Walter Benjamin, but Mr. Reda is the real thing. A flaneur is a stroller, a saunterer on boulevards and city byways; the pleasure of the stroll lies in its apparent purposelessness. In this respect, too, Mr. Reda stands in a long tradition that begins with Villon and culminates in Baudelaire.

Over many books – he issues a new collection every five years – this inquisitive pedestrian, armed only with a camera and a notebook, has wandered through just about every neighborhood of his beloved Paris and then cast them into his nervous and elegant verse. (He’s also written a sonnet sequence on Dublin and has mapped Damascus in verse.) He is a poet of place; in this, a bit like Wallace Stevens with the crucial difference that Mr. Reda’s places are intensely specific and identifiable.

On earlier readings, his poems struck me as the verbal equivalent of Atget photographs. But now, thanks to Ms. Feldman’s translations, I suspect that something subtler is at work.Mr. Reda is an exact observer, but he’s an even better listener. The music he hears and recaptures rises from the very pavements and from “the enigmatic symmetry of balconies.” When he evokes “muddy October, raving in the flurry of red flags,” in a poem about a Jewish revolutionary, the old autumnal fiddles fall silent before the brassy timbre of his tenor sax.

eormsby@nysun.com