Among the many paths opened by Jacques Brault (1931-2022), we find, like an unexpected gift, this collection For ever, stone by stone laid, to trace the path of the tender heart, from hope to bound despair. “Everything is organized around silence, an irrepressible and creative state of childhood – what we call melancholy – which sets one wandering, wandering which is at the heart of his work,” the prefaces suggest. Georges Leroux also highlighted this recently in The duty (October 7-8): “Re-reading Jacques Brault today would not first of all be moving towards this work marked by fragility and melancholy? »
From this vocal origin emerges the loving route of the world, from the lover to the earth and the seasons. “This would be the essential core of his work, the possibility of expressing the heart of existence, but without insisting, always with the right distance and infinite discretion. A respect for the limits of silence, an ethic. » (Georges Leroux). Thus, this discretion cannot be seen echoed in these terrible and sublimely beautiful verses, from the first poem ofFor ever : “there were no birds at Auschwitz / they electrocuted themselves on the fences / and burned hanging on the wire”?
But Brault’s art is not to forget the birds, not to compromise through horror a way of still focusing on the beauty of the world: “By what path of pardoned life / the snow bunting he tears / from the half-broken branch / all fatigue abandoned to the ice of the ground / to fly towards a lamppost / topped with luminous old snow. » How can we better grasp the wing which carries the stubborn resistance to the glaciation of wars, of slow misfortunes? There is so much light despite the night in Brault that the language illuminates the thought of what is essential.
“Come on, the wind, exile us from boredom,” he said again. Luckily, in this wind of poetry, there was the beloved, this “castelaine of little things”, to whom he confided: “The source of all affection / remains so distant but / it still shines in your eyes. »
When pain, darkness appears, terrible and premonitory, in the poet, we know well that at the turn of a page the light will return, “and the pain that whispers / in true poetry ends up falling asleep / childish” . It is the orientation of this writing, its compass, its north. A poetry of counter-sadness, of obstinacy to grasp that where the word gets out, a country has the right to live. “The poetic meaning is the accuracy (and justice…) of the poem. With its language offered to all, it insinuates that the world is different even through its current accessibility. » In Brault, tenderness has loving foundations, a listening to the inner song which carries the pleasure of being to the point of thirst, to “the innocent beauty of a beautiful day”.
In these terrible times which overwhelm us, we must read Brault, because even if “the immortelles in the garden are dying”, even if we hear “a crazy wind like a wolf of pain”, there remains the “poetry, vital breath, nothing of less, / nothing more”.