emotion
The poet’s freedom of writing is immediately evident in eternity is never far. This autobiographical collection stands out by highlighting the poetic expression before the anecdote, or uses it to open up the meaning of gestures, thoughts. Anchored in lively emotion, the facts repatriated from the past, even from death, then relive, confusing tragedy and happiness in a single surge of life. Often advancing by triads, three adjectives or nouns or verbs, the verses are fulfilled through memory and desires. Hope for metamorphoses, too, during the apprenticeship of being a woman, at the time of “these lips of water”. Born in Morocco, she knows “the man with the whip [qui] beats the thoughts”, “all voices united in the same fear”. How not to understand “the exile’s lot […] / the thumb and forefinger / that he sometimes stretches out / in the direction of the heart / as if all horizons came together”? This very beautiful writing reveals a rare poet to us. At the end, let’s be discreet when she confides to us: “I make the desert / oases of open air where I stop from time to time / to drink tea with the disappeared. »
eternity is never far
★★★★
Christine Palmiéri, Hands Free Editions, Montreal, 2023, 162 pages
other forests
In line with My forests by Hélène Dorion (Bruno Doucey, 2021), the odes to nature as inner healing, as a place of great memory, continue. Lands voiced is in this direction, although stylistically very far from its source. Naive love, magnified childhood, the relationship with the father given as magic jostle in this collection full of good feelings: “I’m still waiting / I still hope // the voice of the father”. Coming from “a vast language”, these poems spawn with gentleness, a certain kind of agriculturism (work in the fields is less painful than mystical). Thus, when the father was ploughing, “a subtle dialogue was established between the firmament, the earth and man”. The enamored poet goes further by confiding: “I am still looking for the words / of your ethereal conversations / with the elements”. It would be very fragile if it weren’t for the last part entitled “A simple voice”. There, the world of Greece often evoked in the collection finds to open out, even Hesiod comes to make a turn there. There is a “trembling of the alphabet” that consoles and offers a writing.
Voiced lands
★★★
Claire Dion, Éditions Pleine Lune, Lachine, 2023, 88 pages
heavy toll
Pointillist, the poetry of Lorrie Jean-Louis, in Workforcegoes there word for word, in very short verses: “One step ahead of the others […] / I move forward / staggering // I whisper / to the tired angels // I doubt // I dislocate // worries. » In her prologue, the poet gives us a key to better understand her project: « To write is to offer the song that is missing. I’m not saying that all these people need what I write, I need it to know, to understand. To understand is to love […] ” Although claiming the most lively lucidity, the consciousness of the most radical oppression, the poet strays at times very fortunately on the lyrical side: “What I call a miracle / is the conviction of the / strawberry / to have been caressed / by the sun / so tenderly / that it whispers it to me / on my tongue. “Rare escape from this workforce to which she says she belongs in body and voice. Lorrie Jean-Louis is on a mission and, she says, “now / when I go through the world / if / they ask me / who I am / I will say / a woman who writes”.
Workforce
★★★1/2
Lorrie Jean-Louis, Memory of inkwell, Montreal, 2023, 140 pages
Changes
The image of a snake moulting opens the collection as the symbol of what we leave behind throughout life: “You would like to know how to read this paper, this self free from tremors. You stay a long time in front of this imprint of life on the edge of the dust. From what passes, what to keep? Of these scattered remains, what to find? Faced with this palimpsest that is everyday life, the poet searches for leads in the peace of the beaches, in ephemeral memories, evanescent traces of everyday life. So he beautifully asks this question: “Where do the excess beats of the heart go?” “We would perhaps have liked more clarity about the project itself, while a certain vagueness about its guideline is essential. But apart from that, this collection, very well written, mastered even in many respects, finds its voice. Acknowledging his own precariousness in the face of what he can keep from this fleeting existence, he admits: “You kneel in the middle of this poor inventory, naked and uncertain of what the night will deposit in your hands. These very short prose texts therefore impose their urgency.
What the night lays in your hands
★★★1/2
Tristan Malavoy, Hands Free Editions, Montreal, 2023, 78 pages