Since 1996, Martine Audet has created a body of work which is among the most important of the poets of her generation. His collections, artist’s books and children’s books have been translated into several languages. She offers us, with Useful shapesa 15e book of refined poems in a constantly renewed quest for truth.
Martine Audet walks with a wavering step, but it is in this fragility that she reveals herself and joins us. We share with her an avid gaze of humanity, a thrill in front of the immensity as well as a total incomprehension of the cruelty and the place to occupy in the world.
His pencil drawings accompany the collection. They are reminiscent of a microscopic image capturing chromosomes, perhaps Sumerian characters or even details of sketches. These blurred traces of the passage of time contrast with the sharpness of the poems.
The writer offers us a whole world of winds and childhood, blades and birds, shadows and mirrors that unfold in a collection open to the firmament of language. Martine Audet cuts out forms in the dream, serious or useful. She confides in the words that are part of a lexicon slowly built up over the course of her practice.
The writing broadly embraces the poet’s journey through life, but never presumptuously. Since her beginnings, Martine Audet “asks forgiveness from the species that shines”. With his “tools of presence”, his most recent book creates useful, even benevolent forms. Listening to the slightest rustle of tree leaves, he asks if “dread is a kind of kindness”.
“I enter through the eyes / of what I do not understand. / This dream I neither wanted nor dreamed. / I hear two hearts there / at the birthplace. / I am the good beast, / sometimes its carcass. »
The beating life
The poet has always listened to the beats of life. She meditated there with grace in the previous collection, The Society of AshesGovernor General’s Prize for Poetry in 2020. Useful shapes is also an invitation to revisit his exemplary work. This poetic route where the mystery of existence becomes perpetual motion, a dance that is sometimes lucid, sometimes astonished, always vibrant.
Among many others, the following verse could sum up what a true poetic adventure conceals: “I only invent what I forget”. In the universe of the unspeakable, Martine Audet finds, once again and despite everything, a narrow path between worry and wonder. There is clearly nothing else to explain and everything to feel.
At the end of the book, in the part nine steps for a thousand battles, it pays homage to the show of the same name by Louise Lecavalier, as well as to Nicole Brossard. Between these two great artists, the nine poems want to reach the “light of sleep”. Martine Audet will dream for a long time yet.
Useful shapes
Martine Audet
Noroît Editions
96 pages