light up the dark
Monique Deland skilfully avoids the pitfall that the use of colors imposes when the subject addressed is the studio. Each time, the use of this or that shade is essential here. In this regard, we must highlight the remarkable editorial work both in the reproduction of the works on paper and in the fully colored pages accompanying the texts. Such a Prussian blue, such a Naples yellow or, more rarely, this caput mortuum. “Dead head”, in French. […] A kind of dark brown, purplish, rich and transparent. Made with the shroud of mummies”. We enter this field of pigments with discretion: “On one side, the alphabet. Austerity signs, black on white background. The great asceticism. // On the other, the living workshop. This attachment to the arts is essential against the failure of the world, the debilitating constraints of atrocities, “because colors touch the heart”. As a consolation, the poet confides to us that “the words cast great mauve shadows under the skin”.
Hugues Corriveau
soot black
★★★1/2
Monique Deland, Le Noroît, Montreal, 2023, 136 pages
Tempted by the abyss
The title of Roxane Desjardins’ latest collection really underlines the meaning of what is obscured there. The depression of the poetic voice continues to open its wounds there: “I will die alone, too late, humiliated, blissful. / They will have torn off my peelings, / I will die without risking myself, / damned, ripe. It’s hard to imagine a darker future. “Charming prison, / Five o’clock is a pit. / […] At the same time, / on this side the weeks go on forever, / overlap, / sterile, arranged. And in the midst of this soul disaster, a sharp lucidity makes itself heard, distraught. In free verse, the text becomes a narrative, or becomes opaque under unexpected clashes. But this poetry is also the extreme danger: “Poem my beam. / Moldy star. No concessions to the shadowy mouth. In the very last lines, the poet becomes Ophelia: “I give you my skin / I no longer have use of it, / I settle here, will be moved by the water, / […] I will allow myself to be / the unanimous passion for water. This collection takes its strength very precisely in its confessions and its tremors.
Hugues Corriveau
Black hole
★★★
Roxanne Desjardins, Red Herbs, Montreal, 2023, 152 pages
Aragon, Doritos and Vermeer
Audrey Hébert was born in the east of Montreal, in this “Hochelag beautiful Hochelag / land where children grow up / with a syringe as a tutor”. Arms wide open to her misery, loose tongue to sing her beauties and raised fist to fight her injustices, she pays homage to “her hood”, in her uninhibited and carnivalesque Hochelagurls. Its braided language of Franglais and orality will not be unanimous; too bad. Playing skillfully with language levels, brandishing casualness like a weapon, the one who takes pleasure in “writing Vive Ricoeur in [s]es Alpha-Bits” and “doing high fives / à la Venus de Milo” makes rare music vibrate. Drawing the portrait of her “gurls”, she sculpts an incandescent sorority in a tasty and liberating poetry, from which spring these unexpected nuggets: “what will we do without night / if not to interfere in the interstices of the day / to dynamite everything until to a suitable opacity”. Enjoyable.
Yannick Marcoux
Hochelagurls
★★★1/2
Audrey Hébert, Your mother, Montreal, 2023, 144 pages
A crazy horse in the hand of a poet
We know little about Nathalie Handal here. It is to be hoped that this first translation will change the situation. From the love of strange horses, a collection beautifully translated by Samira Negrouche, invites us to a poetry sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose, bathed between nostalgia and the head-on grip of a carnal present. First songs of ruin, advancing on the shards of exile, Handal takes note of what is lost and that nothing replaces: “There is no other water than water / no other song than song”. Then, in the downpour of oblivion, feeds the sensual and voluptuous storm of a torrid love: “When he discovered my intimacy, sniffed my body as if seeking mercy, together we went somewhere, fluids. The poet has this way of setting up an atmosphere, of portraying protagonists strong in their vulnerability and powerful in their passion. Ardent, his poetry is “a flame that distracts the shadows, / and what stands behind them”.
Yannick Marcoux
Of the love of the horses ethers
★★★★
Nathalie Handel, translated from English by Samira Negrouche, Mémoire d’encrier, Montreal, 2023, 136 pages