The inner secrets
Martine Audet offers us her most accessible collection. It offers the brushing of what shivers on edge. “I know that the heart is the size of a fist, / but what does it grasp of the world / that is not the rain, / not the cross of the rains, / nor its wound / which sparkles? It is always of great formal and evocative beauty. Never will Audet have better reached this emotional fragility, because, here, “closest to the night, / the night is deposited”, “this is how the sorrows / have other eyes / sadness “. Trembles then the gravity of the feelings admitted without detour: […] I hear with each death: be an accomplice! » and to add : « By the way, / I’m all dressed / in names. It is necessary to underline the accuracy of the last part, offered to Louise Lecavalier, around the dance. The great success of these poems is due to their movement, perfectly adequate, where the words dance: “half-points / with filtered black / she / he / and / or / not he / when / the step / the multiplies. »
Hugues Corriveau
Useful shapes
★★★★
Martine Audet, Le Noroît, Montreal, 2023, 96 pages
know how to live
Listening to Leonard Cohen, this is how this Person only unfolds. As if it were necessary to hear the deep modulations of the voice of the “angel of Montreal” so that the “letters of dreams / awaiting their sentence” could be expected. Nature, whether forest or urban, carries Laure Morali, calms her (secret word of this collection) and leads her to contemplation. “Let us open our eyes like the tree / we have roots in the sky” she said, “it would be a morning like the others / with its mourning and its defeats / if a leaf were not torn / from its branch to the moment / where the breath / decides it”. It is thus, in the confidence of the elements that tenderness unfolds, “myriad signs / on the corridors / of writing”. This collection is beautiful with this beauty that makes us meditate on the precariousness of things like time. There is, in these mastered free verses, a force of evocation which ensures that, as the last poem suggests, there is no longer “nobody / only / the heart”.
Hugues Corriveau
Person only
★★★★
Laure Morali, Memory of inkwell, Montreal, 2023, 128 pages
The phantom cry of a canary
“For a long time already / I have buried mourning deep in my viscera”, Sebastián Ibarra Gutiérrez announces from the outset in his collection On open ground. Drawing a rage and distress buried in the sediments of the earth, the poet of Chilean origin – also a mining engineer – takes note of an unprecedented violence, and yet repeated, especially in the mines of Latin America: “in a coffin of tin / eight million slave silences full of pride / mineral blood that is not enough / sobs that the rock cannot tell. “Divided into two parts, the collection is first distressed, devoted to the victims, before arming a vehement cry against the executioners. Braided in a language as erudite as it is sensitive, the verses sometimes try to do too much, but nevertheless make the earth tremble, testifying to a violence too long suppressed: “there were no witnesses / only the uncertain rubble of your lives / and only the shroud of time awaits you”.
Yannick Marcoux
On open ground
★★★
Sebastián Ibarra Gutiérrez, “Poetry” hammock, Montreal, 2023, 88 pages
Worms and humus
Quebec’s literary soil is still just as fertile and a new house has just taken root in the landscape. Editions Conifère are publishing their first titles this month. Alongside Andrée-Anne Bergeron and her Natural entrailsVicky Bernard signs a first collection: What happened to my death. She warns us: “this text is not about / about me”. Rather of these states that life inhabits, of its mourning and its pitfalls, celebrating what remains, in the multiple changes that we go through: “what does not burn takes root”. An existential wandering shaped by multiple emotions, the poetess invites us into a coming and going where finitude and renewal fit together: “I will learn to walk on the ruins / I will come back”. The collection, scattered at times, could skip a few more conventional verses, in particular to make these pearls shine which, in the swell of words, anchor us: “the traces left / will never sum up / we”.
Yannick Marcoux
What happened to my death
★★★
Vicky Bernard, Conifer, Quebec, 2023, 108 pages