Private invitation
Marie Bélisle uses a “camera lucida to explore the memory of the rooms where she slept during her life. In doing so, she draws 35 of these privileged places, showing the space, on the left page, before “reading”, on the right page, the reminiscences that emanate from it. Astonishing and perfectly successful project that releases surprising perspectives on the effect of memory. There ” camera lucida » is therefore put to use, not only in the title of the collection, but also by its imposed evocation, while the poet offers 35 drawings of these rooms under the outline of black pencil lines which define some contours.
But the poet does not limit herself to penetrating back into her private theatres, she lingers in the “antechambers”, reflexive texts inducing the approach that brings her back to these cocoons carrying all the affections. Poetic reflections on the places, they are inserted between the rooms which are incursions into the materiality of memory.
Taking up a title by Barthes recalling the “Places where I slept” fromspace species by Georges Perec, Marie Bélisle inscribes her words between her own theaters and her inhabitable books: “Some rooms are songs: a little of oneself remains in them, a little of them remains in oneself and their light comes back from time to time to color the sleep. »
There is no age that is not invested with this music. Doesn’t she see herself again “in a room without an armchair.” In a girl’s bed narrow as a sigh”? Thus she poses, with regard to the resurgence of these affects, the essential question: “can one really be lucid with regard to oneself, of these fragments of oneself that a room reveals? There are also terrible events hidden there, like this time when she “didn’t hear[t] not that someone in the next room was flying off into the void”.
This collection gives the proof, and we need it, so much this process is hackneyed, that the “list” can still be used to give birth to beauty, to be something other than an instrument of ease and accumulation. This book is a great accomplishment, because it succeeds in reconciling a formal project and an emotional fragility.
warrior and survivor
Those Children of the lichen, signed by Jack Monoloy’s granddaughter, Maya Cousineau Mollen, is discreetly prefaced by Hélène Cixous, who subtitles her text “Thoughts that rise to accompany the songs of Maya the Poet”. This Maya poet of whom she says that she “is a magnificent unforgiving”.
Often composed of couplets, two lines by two lines like one step after another, thought in motion and its voluntary revolt organize the poem. As Cixous says, “Maya writes […] in French-Quebecois-and-Innu-Algonquin, in mother-and-child, girl-and-boy, fureur-et-amour”.
First part: first beat, memory, the desire to survive, carrying the memory of the disappearances of children or women; second part: anger, revolt, cries of souls and hearts. “In the poetry of your last moments / You don’t even have a name / Whisper it to bring back your memory / Make me a sacrilegious dissident”, she confides, aware of the power of the word, of its importance. .
Joséphine Bacon interferes here and there in these texts, she who attaches herself to the essentials of the past, who vigorously recognizes the words of the ancestors, she who “carries in her heart / The poetry of a forgotten people” , as was Joyce Echaquan. Often, too, the rhythm, the jerky rhythm, like a breath pushed to the limit, short of air, but still alive. So “emerge from [s]stanzas / Like distress calls”. But the risk is enormous for whoever speaks, in all lucidity: “To open one’s heart too much / To those who no longer have one // To open up too much / The heart dies of it. This is the drama, this is the challenge.
The very strong beauty of this poetry is illuminated by the balance between a message (yes, it must be admitted) and a force of images which is always of a formidable efficiency. The beautiful and supple writing places Maya Cousineau Mollen among the poets who matter, whose voice amplifies the urgency of poetry itself as speaking out.
The poet evokes the misery and torture suffered by the soul of her people and insists: “Let me hold out my trembling sheet / My written answers to the blood of my family”. That of boarding schools, that of cemeteries. “The poetess is so tired / Of seeing her race slaughtered / At the finish line of eugenics // Her gaze questions the sky / Her destiny is lost in prose // Of these words of a stray bullet / She carves an epitaph. It is up to us to read and reread these words which are odes to the urgency of being reborn, of pursuing and of pursuing itself. Important collection.
assert oneself
Soaring my hands signs a remarkable entry into poetry by Alycia Dufour. What emerges from this intense collection is its assumed violence, submerged in strong images, without any concession to any ease whatsoever, but without ever becoming abstruse. Frontal, these words do not deviate in the face of dramas: “my fathers are stiff boys / and their stories hang / at the end of a rope”, “one speaks to me of dead bodies I dive / to drink from the sap of the drowned I don’t open my eyes”.
Of great beauty, it must be admitted, these texts know how to stand on the edge of dread without batting an eyelid, stand up to tragedy without sinking. Claimant, too, this word burrows, and the poet underlines: “in the heat of linen / all the wounds of my lineage / are poured into a cedar chest”. It’s beautiful, it’s clear, and the precise vigor of these verses, their echo, imposes itself.
She who “finds in the heat of the stove / the first crush” also knows how to give in the dark necessarily of today’s world: “in the backyards the legend watches over the carnage, mamma crochie gloats in the face of the badly born on all fours with full handfuls in the dustbins she devours the repudiated fables when she opens the mouth of the grass snakes flee by her spoiled smile”.
This poetry stands up, looks at the homelessness of women, the loss they sometimes suffer, and frankly highlights “that between the kitchen fire and the forest fire there is only one open door”. Thus, in the palm of our hands, a book of poems that offers a carrying word. And we listen to the poet who confides to us: “I open my eyes / I hold out my fists / In the hollow a flock of birds suffocates. »