She is a poet who listens to a vibrant universe, around and in her, that we find in My forests. Hélène Dorion’s book is a logical continuation of her story, accompanied by photos Landscape time (Druide, 2016), his collection of poems As life resonates (Bruno Doucey, 2018) and his novel Not even the sound of a river (Viola, 2020).
Embracing the secret life of trees with a broad gaze, the poet peels away the layers of meaning to arrive at the essence of animal, plant and mineral species. She listens to the wind in the branches, the rain on the leaves, the rustling, the squawking, even the silence. She recognizes herself in the changing, but heartwarming light of the forest.
More than a return to basics, it creates a symbiosis with transcendence, a thousand leagues from “numbers to say nothing” and “a whole century to undo the landscape”. In this lush book emerges his visceral need to reconnect with the organic forest where the tree knows how to resist.
The worry of the present weather is felt throughout this walk in the woods. The threats are there. They are urban or human, woven of contempt and vengeance. Faced with the chaos of the world, Hélène Dorion wonders if humanity will be able to “climb the mountain to us”, especially since she says she ignores what is silent in her “when the forest stops dreaming”.
Several verses display this universal beauty. Writing allows the poet to reconnect with herself through the sap, branches and foliage. Our reading refers to this mixed feeling of fear and happiness that one experiences when walking in the forest. This feeling, too, of living there, if only for a moment, a portion of eternity.
“It is getting late for the human night” and “time never stands still,” she writes even when, in the news, scientists believe that there is neither beginning nor end to time. Our forests have always known this from their millennial age.
The last part of the collection covers human history with astonishing lucidity, but our small existence can still accommodate great things if it takes root again. We all take our place in this fragile wooden shell with the author who has never written except for the love of her fellows.
My forests is as much a compendium as a confession. The poet succeeds in reading herself in the bark and the knots of which she is made, of which she is made. Dense and complex. As she writes about trees, Hélène Dorion is a “being busy becoming her singular form”.
My forests
Helene Dorion
Bruno Doucey editions
128 pages