Say the city and its suffering
Taking advantage of a six-month stay at the Quebec studio in Rome, in 2019, Carole David lets herself be overwhelmed by a mortuary feeling that the proximity of commemorative monuments, of the smallest stone of memory, instills. Joined by The duty, she specifies that “beyond the bait intended for tourists, Rome is a palimpsest city that defies eternity. It’s almost a definition of writing, isn’t it? The city is also a character. In this case, she has the face of the missing and real women I met during my stay. Despite her prior knowledge of the city, she whispers, “I remain chaos / my smallness is noiseless.”
In The double program of the slain woman, she is Roman, she crosses the city which rustles so loudly in its cobblestones, through the death which sweats at the crossroads on so many marked squares. The sensitivity of the poet is exacerbated by the underlying rumors, by the History which reverberates at the very center of the implacable beauty.
In a surprising text, she summons the image of the assassination of Aldo Moro, former president of the Council of Ministers of Italy: “I could affirm that the stones speak / that they carry within them the hour of death. Asked about this, David specifies that “the presence of Aldo Moro is a foreign body when one thinks of those of the women at the heart of this collection. I came across his memorial by chance while looking for the “street of dark shops”, the one in Modiano’s novel. A memory came back, that of my first trip to Rome during the years of lead haunted by the Red Brigades. » Carole David makes her way around death evoked in a superb way, submerged by a lingering feeling which deaf from the host city.
“Writing, she tells us, allows us to bring the past to life by confronting it with the present. The reason why I still cling to literature. Another truth arises, a moment of revelation, an epiphany. That said, I’m not nostalgic. I summon events as writing engines. “Rome becomes, as she writes, “the place of my loss and my consolation / an ancient city”.
Woman, she knows, “my skin […] after all / belongs to the genealogy of silence”. From the rubble, it’s more than Rome that appears, it’s memories of travels, books read, true stories too. Among many others: the femicide of Santa Scorese perpetrated in Puglia, Beatrice, the parricide, the painter Artemisia, the aunt of di Lampedusa, the first victim of a femicide documented in Italy, the decapitated body, on the shore of the lake of Albano, of Antonietta Longo. Each of the eight remarkable parts of the collection is introduced by illuminating quotes or precise situations that guide the reading. This collection is implacably structured, exemplary even. This is a very coherent project that highlights a word of resistance that insists on the need to live despite death.
talk to each other
The current urgency of communication among poets is affirmed. Normand de Bellefeuille and Laurent Theillet offered us a four-handed collection (So I was now on earthNoroît) of which The duty reported recently. Here is that Louise Dupré and Ouanessa Younsi do the same from an experience initiated by “Outre-langue”, text published in the collective work entitled What exists between us. dialopoetic guages (Editions of the passage, 2018). Thereby, we are not fairies offers us a superbly written and perfectly successful poetic correspondence, inscribing a significant osmosis of their style and their voice in free verse and prose.
A rare adequacy which opens up the vibrant interiority of two poets stimulated by each other, literally carried from text to text to take speech further, to open up to a troubled world. Louise Dupré introduces her collaboration with these words: “Childhood is a ghost town”, to which Younsi immediately replies: “I contemplate this town. »
From one part to another, the poets go into their past to achieve the feeling that has come over them of being mothers and grandmothers, in the face of these childhoods that are inadequate, but rich in desires. Two women made of what they remembered, hoped for, accomplished. These trajectories are written to the rhythm of a vibrato aroused by happiness or pain, by the past and the present, by the joys melted in the heart of a fleeting reality.
Didn’t Dupré hope for “the reassuring visit of a woman and a child who come to add a poem of hope to the alphabet of the world”? As for Younsi, speaking of her son, she “dreams that he can play until the end of words”. Here is a collection to the glory of words, precisely, a great breath of desire so that they still have in them the effervescence of life. Dupré knows it, and admits: “I would like to see the words / catch fire / in my hands // and one becomes a great / burnt / of the poem”, whereas Younsi had previously wondered: “have I abandoned / the child / to the fire”?
This tremendous success can only be born between authors who read each other, listen to each other, carrying their own inner dialogue towards the other, at the risk of any raw truth.
assert oneself
Yannick Renaud writes his Here with gasps in the tongue, constantly breaks the rhythm, as if the words stuck in his throat, jostled on the way out. But yet a brittle and broken vision of the present unfolds. It must also be said that this is not an easy-to-read book, it does not call for ease in readers. This preliminary requirement, it is important to underline it in the context where a certain tendency to tell its daily newspaper in a more banal form is essential at some poets.
This is not the approach undertaken by Yannick Renaud, as if he remained faithful to a more radical conception of speech: “Anger embarrasses, whitewashes the aspirants to holy wars, we massacre the territory, envisage brutality, deflagrate, pulverize the bone that rises between self and thought. A struck blow, one desolates the music, exorcises the ordinary splendor, one expires. »
Discreet poet, Yannick Renaud offers us here his fourth collection since 2005, but each time around this speech emerges a preliminary meditation, a need not to wither thought.
This idea remains frontal, even radical, in its spasms: “Blood on all fronts, the future is crumbling under its faults. The fields we graze, the ashes we eat, the corpse we bite. Litany approaches piety, we laugh, courage has an insoluble taste. These touches of ashes and syllables, this slow pointillism, which deploys both consciousness and dream, thus support a vision of poetry which manages, despite its apparent hesitations, to deploy the mobile heart of the gaze.