under the light
“Tongues pile up / stone and stone / in the maquis of a sentence”, murmurs the text. not don’t hold the fireby Jacques Audet, focuses on clarity to monitor “the sun [qui] lies on the ground like a head”. The gazes are placed in “baskets full of sloes / sober flesh terrible fruits”. Luminous ! Wouldn’t that be the exact word to describe this relevant book? “The chilly light / is tight around the neck” of the poet as well as ours, so much the desire to live trembles. Poet, “a few consonants always dance / at the edge of your mouth / nimble as your joy”! You have to survive despite the dark moons and the quiet tragedies of oppressive days. The search for a precarious balance stems from the desire to look the clashes and misfortunes in the face towards the ultimate destination drawn by these “strings of syllables / by which to ascend or descend / to reach the dancing waters of death”.
Hugues Corriveau
Don’t hold the fire
★★★1/2
Jacques Audet, Le Noroît, Montreal, 2022, 88 pages
Media Weather
The spun metaphor of the weather report, in the perspective of a disrupted ecosystem, continues to weigh down Climax, a fascinating collection by its form and its voluble generosity. At the top of the page the poems are in free verse, at the bottom continuous prose continues throughout the sections. However, ostinato, this work does not exclude clichés, such as these “doors of winter”, or dubious assertions such as “Since I have loved you for a long time / you have loved me for a long time. » The shifts perceived between the space external to human beings and the internal fragility of their relationships are essential: « We will have to lift the anchor of the night once and for all. So, “we will love as long as there is daylight.” There is the true word of the poet, when he emerges from the gaze posed on the weather.
Hugues Corriveau
Climax
★★★
Francis Catalano, Hands Free Editions, Montreal, 2022, 102 pages
Without parachute
“I have no alibi for being so ordinary”, admits the narrator of I would like to fall there, second collection of Madeleine Lefebvre. Now, from this ordinariness springs a dazzling word, tender or vulnerable, which invites us to the ardent breath of desire or to the burns of married life. The framework of the collection is based on five paintings, where the poetic figure is presented without artifice: “You have never really seen me // I was there / overdressed / around the table I was playing / at the board game // as an adversary. Resigned, “prisoner of a war lost a thousand times over”, she compels herself to gestures, too often repeated: “She folds the linen, there is always linen to fold, she applies herself perfectly, the clothes have the new air for his damaged children. “Despite everything, she willingly marries towards new embers, inviting us into a colorful universe where “fireflies illuminate confidences”. Between verse and prose, between flights and falls, between two waters, this collection beats, teeming with life.
Yannick Marcoux
I would like to fall there
★★★
Madeleine Lefebvre, Editions du Quartz, Rouyn-Noranda, 2022, 96 pages
A final tide
After ten years, the adventure of Possibles éditions, an art publishing collective and a factory of printed objects, is coming to an end. This human ember workshop, however, leaves an indelible mark, which has revived a craftsmanship of printing and bookbinding. As a swan song, a last book, the foreshore, invites us to this territory, sometimes covered, sometimes uncovered by the tides. Book-object bound with originality, where words and ink soak the page and detach themselves from it, like the waves gaining the foreshore and withdrawing from it. Three voices follow one another — Isabelle Miron, Sébastien Sauvageau and Guillaume Martel LaSalle —, nourishing in turn an impressionist poetry, to which is anchored a musical score and a poetic genesis of the project: “In this landscape of water, algae and salt / which tirelessly recomposes the living / in a sentence that is both complete and incessant / all thought is superfluous. With an inviting and immersive slowness, hypnotic like the surf, and surprising like a tide.
Yannick Marcoux
the foreshore
★★★
Isabelle Miron, Sébastien Sauvageau and Guillaume Martel LaSalle, Possible editions, Montreal, 2022, 48 pages