Live frankly
There is no need to procrastinate, Hélène Dorion’s poetry is very elegant, touching the poetic spheres with a conviction that seeks to win support. She, whose publisher says she hides a constellation in her name, does not deprive herself of height.
In his new collection, certain words obsess, like “time”, which invades the texts, multiplying its incidences, like “stones”, like “silence”, which sometimes makes you dizzy. It is a bias. According to his beautiful expression, in “the black house of words”, anything can happen at will.
Thus, certain formulas flash and allow the text to induce significant reflections: “like a little noise / at the bottom of the soul / what one is silent / the stones carry it”. These forests, whose opacity calls for exploration, “await the wind / which will make them pitch / like drunken animals / which walk towards their roots”. When one reads such verses, one can only adhere to this traveling, digging proposition, which wants to open secrets.
There is, however, a “but” which prevents us from being totally convinced by this proposal. First, an astonishing anthropomorphism conjures up some of the images, which is surprising in a poet of this caliber. What to do with the “shoulder of the present / the bark of memory”, of the “stuttering of the leaves”, of the “eyes of the wind” or of the fact that “the tree does not escape its suffering?” We still know less what a psycho-pop trend does in these undergrowth. Hélène Dorion has been going there for some time. Militant, she asks us to cut down “the echo of finitudes”, because “towards self-knowledge / we have walked we are immersed / in a long labor of love”, and she even advises us, without embarrassment : “Listen / the path that opens / in your heart”! We are amazed.
Too bad that this beautiful collection, open to lush greenery, to the blossoming of nature, in line with the study on The Secret Life trees of Peter Wohlleben who taught us plant solidarity, is weakened by a bias full of such good will to the point that its rigor pitched.
Cut to the quick
Mathieu Dubé’s business, which at first glance was impossible to succeed, turned out to be a great achievement. How can you imagine for a single moment that you can impose your poetry by cutting out words, bits of sentences, whole sentences in newspapers or magazines, and making strong texts emerge from this childish activity while plunging the reader into admiration? constant in the face of the relentlessness and rigor of this poet-collagist (as he calls himself)? However, he succeeds beautifully.
It must be said that the editorial work of the house Sémaphore is exemplary. We did not skimp on the means, on the quality of the paper, on the very large format of the book, which makes it a superb object. We could have advised him a better title, here too easy, too reductive, unworthy of his work.
Let’s see (in the quotes that follow, each straight line signals a cut and a change of pasted paper): “There may be | poems | who sleep / buried under the rubble / worms | swarming / where pile up / corpses / books and magazines ”. We immediately realize that the choice of cut words is not arbitrary, that the research must have been long and precise to arrive at such fluidity. It commands admiration.
The humor that comes here and there to support the point is never done to the detriment of the exact meaning that the poet seeks to illuminate. For example, he wonders “who had the idea | to coat / The honeymoon / ET | Where then | fled / the midnight sun / and | where the hell | are past / our idols | of marble | DE / plaster | of flesh and bones | worn ”. We know then that the poet is on the lookout for the ambient subtext, which he knows how to find in his montages-collages the shards of meaning that he cuts out, readjusts, to which he gives a new alarm function.
These cries are sometimes targeted at fanatics: “armed to the teeth / sharp / impatient / intolerant / Blinded by / the supposed / beacons / of a cult / or another / heavily misguided / by the anger | by fear / they shoot | in the name of God / slaughter / in the name of truth ”. Evoking, if not forming, calligrams, the poems also draw the underlying meaning.
Beautiful work that gives us to read and see meticulous work.
Of a woman with great strides
Chloé Savoir-Bernard is an important poet. We had already underlined in these pages the remarkable relevance of his first collection, Scotch tape kingdom (L’Hexagone, 2015). This time with Sainte-Chloé of love, the poet goes deeper into what she declared to Dominic Tardif during the publication of her second collection,Splendor (L’Hexagone, finalist for the Governor General’s Award in 2018): “ […] we must always write from shame […] the moment you name, you go beyond the frame of shame. You appropriate a speech, a situation. You are making an act of novelty. “
However, this difficulty in living and this self-appropriation intensifies in her latest collection, as if she was passing a hiring hearing to simply obtain the right to live, to have the power to say that she is black, like life, alive. .
In fact, the poet often sees herself as inadequate, and yet she says, speaks, courageously claims every breath, every sign of love, because “Chloe of love is a saint against death / she exists in the background ”, stubbornly. You should also know that, for her, “talking is sometimes a rupture”, which is another way of being afraid.
“Surprised to be alive at the center of the living”, she goes, gives her word, makes an act of presence. And this is how she asks the essential question for her: “can I be a woman / and still save myself”? Because “nobody likes bitter women / and yet there are many of us in the city”, she says again, “without a country house where we are holed up / the pain around the neck instead of the caress / we imagine islands / , but the islands are us // I don’t know if single women are friends with each other ”.
In this collection which takes the claim of existence far, the search for a place where to say oneself, where to live, the voice of Chloé Savoie-Bernard sharpens, finds a place where to dig her cry of great solitary.