Although titled Landmarks, Vanessa Bell’s new book is surprisingly modest. Modest not in his ambition, but in the humility with which he meditates before these things, indeed monumental, which are territory and love.
Posted at 7:00 p.m.
Both a logbook of a visit to the Newfoundland coast, a tribute to the invigorating power of the wind and a ritual for the renewal of vows between two lovers, Landmarks is a work that begins with the body, more precisely with the singular softness of muscles tired by a day in the open air. But Landmarks is also the work of a gaze that learns, as if by osmosis, its own sovereignty, by frequenting greatness. “To see too much expanse our eyes get used to it,” writes the poet in one of her long blocks of prose, without punctuation, between which are interspersed the magnificent photos of her husband Kéven Tremblay.
Reefs, snow-covered roads, rough waters, harvest of chanterelles: these splendidly misty images, rather than anchoring the text to a single interpretation, have the salutary merit of reminding us that poetry is not detached from the proverbial real life, but that is perhaps the most authentic, the most intimate documentary. And now the author draws up a non-exhaustive inventory of her joys: “Nothing complicated a bread dough that you fry then the molasses in the shelter the air is gorged with sugars hot drinks spices kisses nothing complicated behind the church we take to the north we walk the coast we bite the rocks our knees explode it’s marrying the sum of the fruits the brutal wind your laughter which detonates. »
Animated by a double movement between the immensity of the landscape and the rich tranquility of an inner world which finds its appeasement in contact with the omnipotence of nature, Landmarks carries the indomitable word of a woman who wishes less to change existence than to let everything around her change her, for the better. Vanessa Bell refuses to tame her fiery appetites.
Landmarks
Vanessa Bell and Kevin Tremblay
Chillwind
216 pages