Published by Éditions La Peuplade at the beginning of the month, François Turcot’s most recent collection moves and overwhelms with its meticulous attention to details, those little things that the eye usually skims over without lingering.
Throughout what unfolds like a pilgrimage – during which we recognize Villeray as Barcelona – the poet captures the ephemeral. Each text is a suspended moment, where the infinitely small becomes immense, where the intimate dialogues with the universal. Turcot’s sensitivity translates into a sober but vibrant language, where each word seems weighed, each silence, essential. This collection is an invitation to contemplation. The interior landscapes are outlined hollowly, in an economy of words that leaves plenty of room for raw emotion.
“Soft rain / downstream / of a heron – / I fall asleep arched / in its ruse / gray / stilt of a dream / where the rain lapping” Perhaps the most striking thing about this collection is its ability to creating a deep resonance despite its simplicity. Nature is omnipresent, not as a backdrop, but as an actor in its own right, whose elements seem to be related to the feelings and thoughts of the poet. Turcot masters the art of evocation, succeeding in making the invisible palpable and expressing the inexpressible.
We learn in the acknowledgments which punctuate this work that an illness, a “dizzying diagnosis”, pushed the author to “sublimate the outside”. From wild and fertile gardens to broken branches, including the beating of wings and the songs of birds, everything he observes comes together as if to compose a choir of murmurs.
The poems, often brief, are like snapshots of life, fragments torn from the continuous flow of everyday life. Yet they possess such density that they seem to contain entire lives in their conciseness. Reading this collection requires attention similar to that which he suggests adopting in life: slow down, observe, let tiny things reveal their hidden beauty.
François Turcot’s most recent collection asserts itself as an introspective and delicate work. It is not only a tribute to details, but a real lesson in perspective, a lesson in patience and sensitivity.
In bookstore
The ghost footsteps
The People
95 pages