Lively words which, in various tones, exclude nothing of their asperities are offered to us by formidable poets. Nicole Brossard joins forces with a musician, Jean-Sébastien Huot illustrates his text himself and Jean-Marc Desgent digs into the dark. And that’s without counting on the great Denise Desautels who does honor to Quebec poetry.
Always present, with her fervor, Nicole Brossard never ceases to amaze from book to book, from project to project, with a relevance that nothing constrains, she who is on the lookout, who always speaks in the reality of our contingent hours. . For nail polishBrossard joins Symon Henry, whose poetic-sound collection ugly bird love (Omri, 2020) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Émile-Nelligan Award. He is a great enthusiast of the work of Brossard to whom we owe an opera around his major novel, The purple desert. He punctuates the Brossard collection with colored pictorial scores.
We are all the happier with such an initiative when the workmanship of the book is as superb and rich as what Éditions du Noroît has just produced, but above all when the graphic work finds its echo with remarkable accuracy in relation to the poems.
“ON POSTER WRITE”, as the title of one of the texts announces. However, the poet’s goal is to reach “the enigma of the poem / a successful form of embrace”. That’s it, Brossard offers us a text of love, that of words and life, that of the durability of some of its favorite themes, that of the future to be taken head-on: “in the present I am still / the same sentence and its silence”, “in the meantime the verb to be has become liquid / a form of obscure whisper / from the chest to the lips / as one once imagined / the suffering between two pieces of silence” .
Symon Henry’s chromatic scores accompany this trembling that the phrases possess, this vibration specific to these dynamic links. “I would like to keep the passion of the living us, its momentum,” the poet tells us, while the artist’s blues, reds and blacks weave formal intertwining around meaning.
This collection only accentuates the stimulating relevance of Nicole Brossard who pursues, in the modernity of her language, the underlying traces of our essential presence in the world.
perennial origin
To give meaning to the reminiscences that torment Jean-Sébastien Huot, he must return to the idea of mansions primordial — hence the title of the collection — in which invitations, buried memories, desires for precarious territories open up to us. When he lingers to look at space, he retains, with these words of great beauty, that “the wind carries its empty back”. Thus emerge, through the texts, living places, his inspiring references: “The gaze posed on since by Marcel Duchamp / Surrealist Revolution / I have sunflowers in my eyes / On the right the ardor / On the left the poems under hypnosis of Desnos / I will have crossed the rose gardens of Apollinaire / The sleeps of Reverdy”, after having evoked elsewhere Gauguin .
The texts are accompanied by inspiring colorful paintings by the author representing children’s houses showing, inside their rectangular shape, a door surmounted by two windows, under a pointed roof, as if it were each times with a clownish face.
No doubt these heads of children, no doubt these happy heads, are here to evoke the primary image, that of the mother who, in the house, loved: “She will have made a vow / To regroup the quail bones / In a white circle / Flooding our rooms with chloroform / Tall grass and dew”. It is often magnificent and of great delicacy.
In the drawings, under the houses, sometimes a few nostalgic reflections: “Mom, I’ve failed my mental health again”, is written under a yellow house next to which, hanging from the sky, a mauve light bulb shines. Or this other poem dedicated to the mother: “Without her / Our words stuck disarmed / Our beds in battle / The black spots in the angle of the day / There was this voice which rose / These flower-colored kites / Every morning in the face of blasphemies / The sun whistled. »
Rare are these moments when collections reach us with their whispered beauty, their delicacy to open the doors of intimacy. Here is a book that allows you to breathe both nostalgia and the desire to live.
A Quebec poet at Gallimard
Howls
“Iels”, it is said, speak in the obscure new collection by Jean-Marc Desgent. If we had unreservedly admired the new poetics of Winter paintings, summer paintings (Bush Poets, 2021), this time, A few wild children seems to us to be invested with a complexity that is if not necessary, at least reflecting the fundamental insecurity that unfolds there: “Poor you, me and the other, pray to us, it is the dirty morning of beings. A somewhat vain elegance consists in this collection in moving the final point away from the last word, creating between them a distance that is difficult to explain. Especially since the other punctuations are used there according to the standards. But hey, sometimes the authors try at all costs to do something new, even if it’s hollow.
The author has not accustomed us to so many lists and enumerations either, which does not help. But hey, again, we have to recognize that sometimes the effect hits.
Should we accumulate the fortunes and misfortunes of the world to heighten the drama, should we accumulate sayings and “retellings” to highlight the great and small tragedies of the current time? Desgent, who believes it, thus offers us a cohort of breaking lines, a panoply of broken feelings. Macabre, sometimes, the description: “At night, we spy on what is collapsing, one inside the other, one on top of the other, one, the other. We look for my cleft, my sexual flaw, we bend over it, we see the ghosts walking there, panting skulls, we observe the cold us, the odious ice, the hooded us, the subarctic us who have become dry poor people. And we hold on as best we can on the tip of the nail”.
We follow a cohort of the unloved, the twisted, the abused. The human soul is in perdition: let those who have heart come to decipher its mysteries. Or perhaps it is necessary to go to the sea, to speak of the mother, to escape somewhat from the abolished: “It bursts towards the least of being. »
But there you are, even in such a dim collection, Desgent remains a great poet whose writing, each time, reveals the ardor of the language, the body and soul involvement that goes into it. The text is fiercely frank. And when suffocation is its only vowel, the poem still underlines the obscure “unbirth” of things: “It is said without moving the lips, is revealed […] for the child who seeks his language, his appointment, his brutal, pure, total sun, foragers, bumblebees, flies and horseflies, everything that flies goes and makes a continuous noise. »