Gustaf Sobin (1935-2005) was an American expatriate poet, resident for many years in Provence. He was born in Boston and, in 1962, moved to France, meeting René Char during his early days in Paris, a poet whose work he greatly admired and whose poetry was to have a great influence on his own. It was Char who suggested that Sobin go to Provence, and he settled in a small hamlet in the Luberon, where he was able to purchase an old silk cocoonery, and then to live frugally, while trying to find his way as a writer. It took some years before he was to find his poetic voice but, in the 1970s, his work was taken up by Eliot Weinberger's pioneering magazine Montemora which went on to publish his first two collections. Subsequent collections were published by New Directions and Talisman House. In his later years, Sobin also took to fiction and essays, writing four novels and two remarkable collections of essays on Provence. Dark Mirrors was his second foray into fiction, after Venus Blue.