Résumé :
Since the 1990s, a feature has been developing all over the world: the installation in public spaces of poetic texts written in a wide variety of languages. These “site-specific poems” can be defined as texts whose meanings are modified or nuanced by the relationship with the sites that hosts them. Such poems, inscribed in all kinds of mediums on the most diverse surfaces, can be found in cities, as well as in smaller towns and in natural spaces (from Quebec to Uruguay, including Scottish hills, Alsatian vineyards, the Vosgian forest, the German countryside) In order to study how site-specific poems function, and how they renew the experience of reading poetry, I examine in this paper one particular example: the *Stanza Stones* by Simon Armitage (2012), set in the Yorkshire moors. This sequence of six poems was engraved by the lettercarver Pip Hall on exceptionally beautiful crags. These rocks are now scattered along a fifty-mile path created by the poet himself. These “public” poems are secluded, and they are not always easy to find. Are these texts really read in their entirety, or are they simply touched with the eye, felt in the walking body? What does the hiker do with a poem, once it has been discovered? Is a “close reading” really possible when has to climb on a crag in a quarry to try to reach the text? Does the walk, and the particular kind of attention it involves, become part of the reading experience, or do they supplant it? Reading these texts on location and on the page gives rise to two entirely distinct experiences. Armitage and Pip Hall had to adapt the texts to the stone rugged surface. The engraved texts might be touched with the hand. When rain fills up the engraved word “Rain”, rain itself writes the poem. Armitage’s texts gain new meanings when they are read out-loud at the landscape, in the wind. Moreover, the Stanza Stones do not stand on their own. They invent continuities with everything that surrounds them, and especially with other remarkable local rocks which have names, inspire folklore or rituals, and bear cup and ring marks engraved in the Neolithic period. It appears that the precise analysis of a site-specific poem must therefore focus on the interactions between four different elements: - the text itself - the typography of the text and the material characteristics of its support. - the significance of the site and its configuration. - the “expanded landscape” enveloping the textual objects: the artefacts I am studying draw their meanings from proximal elements. They are carried by physical, cultural, artistic, literary and imaginary landscapes. Indeed, Armitage’s *Stanza Stones* respond to the poetry of stones developed by Ted Hughes, notably in Remains of Elmet (1979). And while Armitage placed his texts directly on the moor, Ted Hughes invited the landscape into the book, in the form of black and white photographs taken by Fay Godwin. The question at stake is indeed that of the interrelation between poems and landscapes. Armitage’s poems are re-articulated to their referent in order to gain immediacy: the *Stanza Stones* are realized in the site, and the texts attempt at translating into words the landscape’s natural language.