The river is an encounter
Unexpected meeting between Danielle Fournier and Louise Marois, I don’t like purple alternates the prose poetry of one and the verses of the other, where the force of the tides is shared by impetuosity and melancholy. From the outset, their voices harness time and put it to their measure, to invite us to the beats of the surf of L’Isle-aux-Coudres. Without echoing each other, rather like two gazes focused on the same wide area which carry forgotten songs, their words unfold in the span of full and sovereign lives: “It is neither yesterday nor tomorrow. Today. Time is counted. She is old enough to know that. » They have known the broken nights, “the smell of the end / of miracles which will never come back”, and “yes, they are tired”, but they are not worn out by the intensity of beauty, quick “to notice the branches of the trees bending in the wind, a lullaby falling backwards.” A collection that makes a strong impression, literally, since it benefits from remarkable visual work, where Louise Marois’ photographic montage cradles fragmented landscapes, washed with purple hues.
Yannick Marcoux
I don’t like purple
★★★1/2
Danielle Fournier and Louise Marois, Noroît, Montreal, 2024, 80 pages
Old dreams new
Two years after his formidable Curvature of the earthin which Jonas Fortier invited us to float in aerial verses, here he offers us a new flight with Looking crazy. Life here takes on more defined contours, where poetry, despite several fanciful excursions, becomes more down to earth: “I remain / reduced to dust on your mattress / I hear the cars outside / such is my horizon”. Drawing their poetic material from everyday life, sometimes suave, sometimes innocuous, the poems offer as many stories as characters, who benefit from the benevolence of the poetic authority. The disappointments generated by this society that struggles to dream, however, allow a healthy fury to emerge: “I was born politely on my back / without ever giving my opinion / which does not prevent me from being angry”. We could have ignored certain lines – “you have nothing in the bank / & I have nothing except you” – but there is, in the reminiscence of a past ready to emerge – ” the snow melts laughing / & in another form the past begins again” —, the striking reminder of a timeless beauty, which belongs to no one except those who know how to recognize it.
Yannick Marcoux
Looking crazy
★★★1/2
Jonas Fortier, The Goose of Cravan, Montreal, 2024, 88 pages
Disturbing
A fantastic collection filled with strident writing. It is a book of captivating stories, each text of which can be read independently, a true poem breathless in the face of these losses, at the end of love-to-death. “Vienna” will die, inevitably a woman to be taken: “when we find her she will be / hanged by these men who are looking for her / these men who make holes / who make men”. The “Springwaters” torment an infanticide madly in love with her daughter in an absolute desire for osmosis, dragging her under the waves, but “it is the fault of the tides and the salt that make her mad”. “Veiller” emphasizes the desire of a mother to enter alive into her foster child, she who whispers: “your navel the hole where I sink and sink” attracts him for a reverse birth. These women are panting, at the end of a rope, in the mangrove or under the primitive waters, but each one carries this piercing cry of overload, of the weight of being a woman or a mother, of being. This collection fascinates, literally, in its black convolutions which present its portraits like cries for help. A cruel loneliness hangs over these disturbing deaths.
Hugues Corriveau
a story within a story within a
★★★★
Geneviève Blais, Bush Poets, Montreal, 2024, 104 pages
Unforgettable journey
To stop at length at these Surrealist imaginations, is to enter a land of memory. In his remarkable and essential afterword (with such a beautiful title) “This extreme event of writing”, François Charron rightly underlines that “the real storm that surrealism raises in the middle of the century, we can never say it enough, testifies to a surprisingly courageous thirst for freedom. » He adds in a more learned manner that “by manifesting the acuity of their temperaments, the misconduct of our surrealist poets inaugurated an essential dialogue between the anguish of personal annihilation and the wonder felt in the face of the ever-renewed escapes of reality “. Rediscoveries await us in each of the collections which are illuminated here in current days with renewed vigor. So browse The sands of dreams by Thérèse Renaud, let yourself be enchanted by The dazzling dawns by Suzanne Meloche, meditate Poems of the sleeping woman Micheline Sainte-Marie or appropriating Objects of the night by Jean-Paul Martino are so many superb moments that lift us up.
Hugues Corriveau
Surrealist imaginations.1946-1860
★★★★
T. Renaud, S. Meloche, J.-P. Martino, G. Groulx, M. Sainte-Marie, M. Drouin, Les Herbes rouge, Montreal, 2024, 424 pages