Drifts
Annie Molin Vasseur confronts the end of a time when words carried the meaning of the future, crumbled over the ages. An opaque collection that addresses a somewhat abstract humanity, which she looks at with sadness. The wish for happiness is diluted in an abstraction often poorly anchored to realities that are nevertheless perceptible: “Guardian of memories / you believed you would never see dry up / a sand for the step / a horizon to cross / walk on land / and watch the ocean / you sail on books / small boats.” Beautiful, certainly; clear, less certain. Wars and the disorders of history pass here and there. And the poet seeks if there is a way to recite differently The Requiem of Wordsto draw from it a meaning that is still stretched towards the future. Between “a little lame person”, “a broken baby” or ” the little cat is dead » (quoting Molière), the word is searching for itself. Thus the author lets “memory come / in what flows with ink / from the hands of poets” and repeats a “go” like an incantatory desire to push further the quest for a word that is still effective.
Hugues Corriveau
The Requiem of Words
★★★
Annie Molin Vasseur, The Writings of the Forges, Trois-Rivières, 2024, 64 pages
Divination
Marianne Martin says she draws inspiration from The Way of the Tarot by Alejandro Jodorowsky. We would have liked to feel it better. However, the author thwarts seriousness with jokes, as the title of her second poem proves: “You will never see my feet”, which refers to the Popess card on which they are precisely not distinguishable. Is there reason to get confused here in psychocritical research? No! But should we believe in a subliminal message when the poet reminds us: “I still get tangled up / in my suitcases of insignificance”? There is sometimes reason to think so. In fact, we do not really understand what this collection is about, going a little everywhere according to the drifts caused by the tarot cards. We can find a few details that could be associated with it, but the surrealist bias, if not automatic, imposes itself, stuns and turns on empty. We learn in her presentation that “her friends regularly ask her to babysit their cats when they go on trips.” Would that say it all? No, but we hope that a second collection will help us better understand this frayed enterprise.
Hugues Corriveau
It’s just a game
★★1/2
Marianne Martin, Bush Poets, Montreal, 2024, 88 pages
Echo from beyond the world
Germaine Beaulieu has already addressed, in a poetic trilogy, mourning and the apprehension of our finality, but can we ever free ourselves from the grip of death? His most recent collection, Whisper to the Unknown, invites us “into the closed doors of the abyss” where “time / creates death”. The poetic body experiences the departure of its big sister, who has gone to the land of “the bodyless”. Taking note of what is lost, she questions what remains and, incidentally, the place that now belongs to her: “At the shore of the disappeared / What remains of oneself. » The framework of the poems is based on short verses, blowing an even rhythm, sometimes repetitive. Well placed at the heart of its subject, the collection uses numerous descriptive metaphors, where the overload of images keeps us on the periphery of emotion. Is it because certain hackneyed propositions – “Conjugate the verb to be / In all tenses” – are annoying? We lose the strength of precious moments, where each word hits the target: “Our devoid voices / Go to sorrow / Draw consolation. »
Yannick Marcoux
Whisper to the unknown
★★★
Germaine Beaulieu, Hands Free, Montreal, 2024, 114 pages
Cabbage cigars
Akim Gagnon’s arrival on the literary scene has not gone unnoticed. With his wanton and jubilant tongue, woven into a well-felt vulnerability, he knew how to embody a figure whose sympathetic familiarity makes you want to listen. His most recent collection of poetry, Deux pour un – literally two collections in one, published head to tail –, however, leaves one doubtful. The first proposition, Galvaude, echoes his novels, with his verses that we would have liked to be more compact, but whose absurd images juggle with multiple emotions, creating skillful tensions that a histrionic mind recovers for our good pleasure. The second proposal, The White Knight, would be the rewriting, from memory, of a collection that his father once wrote for “his French muse”. The poet feels the need to free his psyche and his pen from the memory of this “amalgamation of romantic and very cheap hope for vague feelings”. The approach, however honest it may be, leads to a painful result. What was Akim Gagnon’s intention? Homage to the father, democratization of verse or sociological study? Even in the second degree, we get a little bored. The mystery of the knight remains unsolved.
Yannick Marcoux
Two for one
★★1/2
Akim Gagnon, Hurlantes publishers, Montreal, 2024, 132 pages