Resistance Rosaries
The poetic figure of Pietà fear, by Nicholas Dawson, confuses “concern and love”, at the moment when illness and the disruption of the cosmos play their cursed countdown. In search of appeasement, he summons the rituals of those who gave birth to him. Abuelawith “his fingers swollen with mercy”, his mother and his “useless guilt” which “wears out his knees” and his hermana, linked to him by a secret language and a love which, has always known how to reconcile their fear: “between the sea and the Cordillera our prophecies / rhymed three times repeated / put an end to the sobs”. Between lullaby and prayer, fears, beliefs and hopes intertwine in a dance which, despite the inevitable end, is in no way macabre. Closest to the abyss, the verses unwind, embalming fear with their ecumenical perfumes, and from these symphonic rituals emerges a sacred communion, the pious wish of a family which clings “at the last second so that it stretches like the future that exile promised us.”
Yannick Marcoux
Pietà fear
★★★
Nicholas Dawson, Noroît, Montreal, 2024, 120 pages
#Messiaen
There is a lot to sink your teeth into in Bertrand Laverdure’s most recent collection of poetry, Opera of Disconnection. Opening with the end of television, “this first robot with social regulation”, the collection invites us to “throw everything away to rediscover the fable, to relearn how to travel without a helmet”. The writing is first of all a game where the character-narrator pursues an allegory that he would like to add to the music of Olivier Messiaen. Despite the latter’s pleas – “I ask you to listen, therefore not to flee. » —, attention is elusive in this era of hyperconnectivity: “Everything conspires to reactivate one’s worries, feed the digital machine with bits of scam, participate in social theater. » Sometimes a little grandiloquent, this hybrid proposal, between prose and free verse, between poetry and documentary, is sensitive and disconcertingly lucid about our times. As a gift, it relates the incredible conditions which led to the creation of the French composer’s Quartet pour la fin du temps, an ode to music, this “invisible door to what you want”.
Yannick Marcoux
Opera of disconnection
★★★ 1/2
Bertrand Laverdure, Hands Free, Montreal, 2024, 114 pages
What daughter says about mother
This book talks about mother and daughter, the difficulty of being both: a recurring problem in women’s writing. Diane Régimbald returns, fortunately, with a collection of excavations and conscience. The works of Sophie Lanctôt, which are superbly reminiscent of those of Betty Goodwin, appropriately illuminate the book with an obvious visual echo. This return to the mother, this knowledge of being a daughter, this clash of becoming a mother in turn, this is the journey of these often very touching poems, which pursue an interior truth: “I dig in the slates / what binds us / there its purple base is inscribed / its traces where the water slides / which I drink intoxicated / I manage to read / the signs which compose it / I manage to engrave in myself / its threshold. » Supple, this sinuous writing never tears. This book does not claim to impose a new subject; on the contrary, many of the quotes that accompany it speak of the same subject, but he manages to speak the truth, without flaws, of an intimacy that underpins his work. Everything is at stake here “in insatiable love”.
Hugues Corriveau
She would still like somewhere else
★★★★
Diane Régimbald, Le Noroit, Montreal, 2024, 144 pages
The sea of tranquility
A very small book, with its 42 poems. With his gaze fixed on the stars or on nature, the author seeks the calm beat of the days. One might believe from this summary that it would be bloodless; and then no, because the joy of being, of saying it, of writing about it is sometimes enough with a few words. Does the author get up that “at the window, dressed in rivers, [il] see [t] a nest of flames warming secrets like pieces of ceramic on dew.” But he is a philosopher, the poet, who knows that “a slow rain on a tired sun cannot change the wind or the momentum of the clouds as much as the heart allows.” Written in prose, these texts create, on the edge of a whisper, a vibrant atmosphere in its breaths. It is because the poet has “laid down his arms, […] do [t] trust in infinity like in large school notebooks.” It is not naive, but rather recorded in the tenderness of an insatiable desire for serenity. To be read with the delicacy that fragile words require. This song, astonishing today, is very rare, and being able to admit that it feels good, even more so.
Hugues Corriveau
Letters to the white sky
★★★
Emmanuel Simard, Bush Poets, Montreal, 2024, 64 pages