The fourth book and second collection of poetry by Marie-Hélène Voyer, Chickweed, represents a masterful work. The author pays homage to her deceased mother and, at the same time, to all the women sporting stifled desires and sewn mouths for too long.
Posted yesterday at 1:30 p.m.
Chickweed is an annual plant with red or blue flowers, the seeds of which are toxic to birds. And birds, there is a lot of talk in this collection – “their hair is crazy crows”, “my mother had the beauty of a worried bird” – where the voices unite to tell the difficult life of women, yesterday to today.
Employing the “I” as well as the “you” or the “they”, the poet ends up joining the cause: “I want to be able to always say we. Everything is here. She thus participates in a kaleidoscope of women’s experiences poisoned by life and society.
Mothers, their sisters and daughters have to endure with closed eyes and serve without saying a word, then start again the next day. Time belongs to them, however, demonstrating their raison d’être, their resistance, even their power. They have the imposing weight of those who burn and who are not afraid to do violence to themselves to move forward.
Interested in history and the “stubborn memory” of those before her, Marie-Hélène Voyer draws a long portrait of fighters and fighters, “little queens of nothing crowned with spruce trees”, “brave and lively mothers in their smells of exhaustion” and “chirpy cheeky girls”.
The collection is nourished by a rich language of the past which adds to the depth of the subject. Poetry arises from everyday life and from small gestures, from too many renunciations and endless labors. The picture, quite dark at times, takes on color as it becomes clear that it is the women who, despite the dead left on the way, continue the world.
Through the force of language and a back and forth between the personal and the feminine universal, Marie-Hélène Voyer’s poetry strikes hard and true, going beyond anecdote or pathos. It moans, it swarms and it wriggles in this book with “a splinter stuck in the palate” to pierce all the secrets, the “body hollowed out in shadow” and the “tears needed to make an angel food cake”.
In the end, gathering all these fragments of life, the captain of this ship of witches crossing a deadly sea acts as a link between the previous generations and that of her daughter. The circle is complete and the song of the birds will continue to wake us up in the morning.
Chickweed
Marie-Helene Voyer
The People
216 pages