song of the heart
Despite the repetitions that quietly impose themselves in Innu writing, Alexis Vollant, classical pianist, knows how to rhythm the verse, stretching his sentences in the breath of the country to be translated, each part being identified by a musical movement. We follow him to his Nipinapunanthis place where people spend the summer, to accede to the desire of the poet’s lover whom he asked to make this original journey, to find “the Earth [qui] is to hearts and souls / [qui] is to the Cosmos which cherishes time / and which catalyses the sound / misha-tshshipanu e tshinikuanipan / the speed of a voice lost long ago”. Incessant quest for what survives, what appears and revolves around oneself. An immemorial lament, the song of the throat unfolds at the precise place of birth. The text expresses this desire: “eukuan ne, that’s what I’m trying to tell you / a smiling people with a wounded smile / a people of all misfortunes / carried by the beauty of the world”. It’s up to us to listen to its upheavals and laments, its desires to live in the heart of the present. Beautiful collection that the love of the country carries.
Hugues Corriveau
Nipinapunan
★★★
Alexis Vollant, Hannenorak, Wendake, 2023, 104 pages. In bookstores May 30.
Elusive calm
A need for warmth, protection, happy moments of tranquility arouses Simoneau’s writing in his quest for precarious happiness. Searching for the sun, for light, both interior and fluctuating, this collection sets up ephemeral places, passages of birds and shadows, lakes and brushings: “I hope for an exhaustion of the dark”, he said quite rightly. If “we live like prey / with islands / of raw shame”, we still have to know how to find refuge, find ways to transgress anxiety. Now, linked to the seasons, to the fluctuations of sunlight, the poet’s well-being is said to be fleeting, linked to falling fruits, to leaving leaves. In short, there is a surprising depth of naivety in the way of saying anguish, a link often heavily supported around animal or plant metaphors: “October / throws its peels / in the dew // it’s beautiful / but it’s is perhaps a presentiment / of death / which will come to unhook its plums / by twisting them one by one / by the heart”.
Hugues Corriveau
Lengths in the twilight
★★★
Mathieu Simoneau, Le Noroît, Montreal, 2023, 104 pages
The bridge of discomfiture
It is impossible to predict the next verse of Daniel Leblanc-Poirier. Welder of lunar words, the poet had fun, according to his work, to telescope us into parallel universes, creating unexpected and absurd images. His latest collection, Laval, is no exception: “the bottom of the cup looks like a cold orgy / and I carry it / dragging my feet / in the gruel of the moon”. For once, the writer offers us the mosaic story of an elusive love, where the pursuit of the beloved figure is also a pretext for an existential quest: “I don’t know how to become myself / who am I on the back of my thirties / the knots of feelings are flowing / like eggs”. Daniel Leblanc-Poirier opens the metaphorical floodgates, offering dense and immersive atmospheres, but it also happens that the images, too numerous, drown in abundance. Poetry sometimes blinding, but which does not fail to shine with all its fires.
Yannick Marcoux
Laval
★★★
Daniel Leblanc-Poirier, Del Busso, Montreal, 2023, 72 pages
Despite the fault
Where does Nathanaël invite us with her latest collection, As always ? In universes where time is multiplied, shaped by complex atmospheres, where one walks, scythe in hand, wrinkled attention, searching an opaque night where “the moon also moves its sky”. She invites us to the story of the ancestral child, born of a “silent coincidence”, “orphan or bastard”, who comes into the world while walking “in the crumbling of the edges that she carries within her like a secret too acute “. Nathanaël’s prose is dense, made up of small steps, setbacks and iterations that recall the incoercible and meticulous progress of the stories of Marguerite Duras: to the foams and the projections and the bursts of dawn that flood us. “Kneaded with pain, but poured out with beauty, As always is a relentless and hypnotizing breath from which deaf a hoarse and stunned song.
Yannick Marcoux
As always
★★★1/2
Nathanaël, L’Hexagone, Montreal, 2023, 60 pages