Floating in the fog of our time, ignorance and fear can win over anyone who thinks of wars, deadly viruses and the dying planet at the same time. Joël Pourbaix escapes it by raising his eyes to the sky. He tirelessly digs into infinity… and even further, one might add.
Posted at 5:00 p.m.
Observing the cosmos brings us back to the small place we occupy in the universe while leading us, on the other hand, to continue dreaming again and again. The poet found matter there “to welcome the immensity [qui] preserve our humanity. Otherwise, he notes, “making the present a home / makes us homeless” in “the anguish of being almost nothing”.
This dense book creates links between the more than small and the disproportionate, between neutrinos and exoplanets. Joël Pourbaix’s sky map celebrates interstellar silence as much as liberating light. The poet evokes his own youth passionate about the first trips to space, the astronauts who took part in them and the scientists who tried to explain the big whole.
It reminds us of the discoveries of the most famous observatories in the sky, the Apollo missions, the adventures of Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova (first woman in space) of this world, the stars of our spatial neighborhood as well as the others, very distant , which carry “the promise of the living”. He skilfully uses precise prose and poetic projections. After all, it’s not the choice between two words that counts, but “the space that unites them”.
This fusion of long poems and more “documentary” sections propels the reader into a fascinating ether, without being totally disconnected from the earthly. When the poet interweaves everyday elements, he caresses with a dreamy hand a certain form of transcendence, that of the universe which whispers, of space which heals and of the tranquility of the sky. Since “every night / our bodies are reborn”.
Noroît published last fall Nomadic intimacy: choice of poems, 1980-2014 by the same writer, who won the Governor General’s Poetry Award in 2015 for Homesickness is a forgotten art. For 40 years, Joël Pourbaix has created one of the most solid works in which he has been able to amass the debris of reality to turn it into stardust.
If his walk among us goes unnoticed, as he writes at the end, his delicate words and his just language will remain in the hearts of those who stagger and seek, like him, “solar pride”. In Black nightthe poet offers us the happiness of seeing better, with our eyes closed.
Black night
Joel Pourbaix
Chillwind
160 pages