Towards the improvement
Fernand Ouellette, La Grenouillere
Editions de La Grenouillère, in their prestigious collection “Classiques du XXIe century”, will make appear Towards the improvement, of the great Fernand Ouellette (February 21). Each publication of this poet is one of height in the face of life, an ode to “the wife on the way”, as Alfred DesRochers once said. From these unpublished texts, let us remember that “The heart is compressed / In a hollow of being and of night. Is this, now, / The way of living? Now, he knows well that “Everything causes the eye to lose its light / Attentive to the revelation of the new day. Attentive and impatient, we await this great collection. The spirituality we know from him flourishes in this new book, which he suggests will be his last. We don’t believe in it, we don’t want to, even if he asks the loved one: “Leave your music even inaudible / Tune in to my breath. We will also monitor, at the same editions (La Grenouillère, February 7), The chestnut groveby Daniel Guénette, a friendly tribute to Gérald Tougas in a biographical poem.
Black hole
Roxane Desjardins, Red Herbs
Book of existential questions facing writing, Black hole (Les Herbes rouges, February 21) opens the abyss where the word that we nevertheless wish to retain can be extinguished without warning. “This book starts at the foot of the wall. I have nothing more to say, I have no more breath. But they question me, they harass me: “What is the matter with you? what are you suffering from? what harm have I done you?” writes Roxane Desjardins. Now, precisely, in front of the depression, the abyss: “Getting hold of a few words that are too big, I set out to build stairs. Poems that go down the stairs. This poetry of all dangers, worried, frightened, spreads out in long free verses each time covering a full page, to fill the territory, to accentuate the fear: “They said that the sky / would be covered with needles, / that our skin / would become watertight, / they promised music / and terrible heat waves. / We remain entwined, / badly eaten. This galactic black hole would no longer be a swallower of reality, but a producer of meaning. We will have to confront it.
Soot black, Workshop poems
Monique Deland, Le Noroît
To wonder about its creation, here is indeed the enterprise of bringing to light that Soot black, Workshop poems (Le Noroît, February 7) continues, despite the dust accumulated after the cremations, leaving the thought bloodless. He will then have to enter “a cave with the smell of the end of the world. » From this emptiness which makes his resistance fragile, he is left with the irremissible and « astonishing desire to give form. These workshop poems will “reactivate the ghosts of the father, the twin sister, the younger sister, as well as that of the poet herself. We still have to respond to the invitation to follow Monique Deland, who also offers us her visual works, through this process of resistance: “Hold on where we can. […] // Sit there in the middle of fate. Walk the eyes […] Breathe hollow, like in an egg. To say to oneself here is the world stops here. // Calm down, body. We are in a poem. Safe space. » Note that beforehand, Useful shapes will be proposed to us by Martine Audet (Le Noroît, January 24).
Person only
Laure Morali, Inkwell Memory
“Writing while listening to Léonard Cohen”, is there a more subtle way of remaining connected to Montreal, to what remains in itself of residual emotion? Person only (Mémoire d’encrier, published on January 16) immediately imposes an ambiguity between the presence of being and its absence. It will be necessary for Laure Morali to add words “to the luminous void” of reality to access this trip to childhood, which has returned to its troubling reality. We are told that “an unprecedented dialogue then opens with the angel of Montreal, around the rises and falls that punctuate our births and our rebirths. » Hearing the return of the rocking movements, making the body and the sacred appear, reminiscent of Joséphine Bacon or Rita Mestokosho, going in the direction of the currents: « the night of the rivers / liquids will be the voices / which touch no one / it will rain / until ‘to the fire / the fire will have no color. » We can also learn about From the love of strange horses (Mémoire d’encrier, January 30), by Nathalie Handal, one of the great voices of contemporary Palestinian poetry.
genesis, cradle, moon drawing
Jean-Philippe Bergeron, Poets of the Bush
Jean-Philippe Bergeron received the 2004 Alain-Grandbois prize for Faces of panic (Lanctôt, 2003; Poètes de brousse, 2016), and the Quebecor Grand Prize at the Trois-Rivières International Poetry Festival 2020, co-winner with Martine Audet, for states and abysses (Poets of the Bush, 2019). His seventh collection, genesis, cradle, moon drawing (Poètes de brousse, March 29), addresses the birth of a child and its impact on the life of the parent, what is called here “the existential bifurcation”. Pushing even further the troubled apprehension of the phenomenon, genesis, cradle, moon drawing would propose a “phenomenology of appearance”. In order to understand the upheavals engendered by the appearance of the child, the poet attempts an immersive approach to the new being: “I develop / at the junction / beats / rapids of your heart / and of my pulse / a explanation / of resemblance / and dissimilarity / as a ghostly / ligature. We will take a close look at a promising first collection, When the sky turns red (Poètes de brousse, March 15), by Camille Lapierre-Saint-Michel, articulated around the mourning of the mother.