Walk in friendship
From the first poem, a versified rhythm imposes an archaic voice that deploys a tenderness to split the soul. The novelist Gérald Tougas, who died blind, was the great friend of the poet, and it is about him that we are talking about in this collection which, like the man who planted trees from living memory, brings out of time confused chestnut trees with walnuts. In short, the vagueness of the place tints the nostalgia of unfulfilled dreams. In fact, as the text of the presentation of the collection remarkably puts it: The chestnut grove recomposes the face of a man whose eyes seemed to be beauty itself resting on the beauty of the world. » Biographical collection, collection of the deep feeling which binds two men of letters, each admiring of a nature stamped with benevolence. This collection is reserved for those who still believe in the beauty of good feelings, without judging their relative obsolescence. “See as if you were looking at the world / Through a straw / Its long little tunnel fixed at the end of your eye. »
Hugues Corriveau
The chestnut grove
★★★1/2
Daniel Guénette, La Grenouillère, “The unpublished workshop”, Bromont, 2023, 80 pages
Abortion
Having had a mother and renouncing to become one oneself, thus emerges one of the founding themes of Charlotte Francoeur’s latest book. The “I” of the collection is said to be aborted three times, confronting this brutal truth, whereas: “the line [est] so thin / between the cord / umbilical and the noose”. Audacious proposal, courageous even in that there is no pity there, standing at the limit of coldness. The relinquishment of maternity is fully assumed there, tackled frontally. In this, this book is of undeniable strength: “I would have liked to keep everything / everything, except their parents / and my pain”. In view of this lucidity, we would have liked less ambiguity in the affirmation of the subject. Thus, we do not really know what to do with these disturbing words like “shame”, “mourning” or “mourning” in front of these non-lives. However, this radical posture “I am this non-mother who hates her non-children” should have spared us some ambiguity.
Hugues Corriveau
Goodbye prawns
★★★1/2
Charlotte Francoeur, Le Noroît, Montreal, 2023, 96 pages
A poetic mobile
Jean-Philippe Bergeron, in Genesis, Cradle, Moon Drawing, is on the threshold of an “existential bifurcation”, engendered by the forthcoming birth of her child. In the amniotic sac, a life takes shape, which is linked to the advent of his paternity: “in the last image / ultrasound a slight / tension of your foot / expresses the tightrope walking / at work in me”. Arrived in the world, his daughter incarnates in double: “the jelly in which / your face and mine are caught”. With slowness and delicacy, as if the sleeping child should not be awakened, the verses embed themselves in the living, celebrating each breath, iteration of existence: “I verify / from your breathing / that it proceeds / like mine / by identification / and cut / with the abyss”. The collection shows a few bombastic images that stifle emotion, but there is an immanent sweetness to the rhythm of the verses, created in particular by their spanning. Who would have thought that “nuchal translucency” was poetic?
Yannick Marcoux
Genesis, Cradle, Moon Drawing
★★★
Jean-Philippe Bergeron, Poets of the bush, Montreal, 2023, 92 pages
The verse at the end of the tunnel
According to Catherine Paquet, poetry is the only place where she has been able to “knit together contradictions, plunge into an abyssal hyper relativism [s]e patent a way of being human”. His first collection, Madam full of shitreminds us that she has long wallowed in the “oversized well of expectations / that haunted [ses] dreams of youth”. By probing too much “the hopes of / seeking the best / deep down in others”, she seems to have forgotten herself, muting her idiosyncrasy, “an old young woman in a performance suit”. Over the verses, however, his voice is affirmed, his thoughts are deposited, and this ” self-made wannabe woman / real real woman like the clichés / […] complexed, but well dressed”, turns out to be mature and lucid, “hands full of contemplative paintings”. If we sometimes have the impression of standing still, there are many flights that catch us, nesting the emotion by dosing just the right amount of mocking irony.
Yannick Marcoux
Madam full of shit
★★★
Catherine Paquet, Howling, Editors, Montreal, 2023, 102 pages