For ever
Jacques Brault
One of the major events of the new season will be the posthumous publication of For ever (with 11 drawings by the author) Jacques Brault. More than 50 years of work, so many years of remarkable texts, distinguished by numerous awards, including three from the Governor General. This time, we are offered a booklet, which is announced with great finesse, which would pay homage to deceased relatives or authors, as well as to ancient forms. Under the sign of survival, here is the unexpected beyond, the great definitive silence, “because eternity is also only a somewhat long word”. In the preface, Emmanuelle Brault and Paul Bélanger specify that it is an “echo of the first breath Of love and death dedicated to Madeleine, 65 years ago, in 1957.” They see it as proof that we are in the presence of an opening towards “accomplishment”. The author ofThere is no more path will nevertheless draw us that of speech.
Le Noroît, October 10
If affinities
François Hébert
Fire François Hébertformer professor of literature at UdeM and director of Freedomhad just published his novel Frank will speak (Leméac, 2023) and will not have been able to attend the publication of If affinities, whose afterword is by Nathalie Watteyne. Always eclectic, he wanders between Kanye West and James Joyce, a McDonald’s parking lot and Plato’s cave. Carried by the lightness and elegance of happy despair, here he is invited into poetry. “He always has better things to do than poetry,” writes [François Hébert] : war, children, shopping… But to see better, there are only words. » He always signed this impertinence, with that little bit of insolence that the philosophers of ordinary life know how to point out so well. In 2008, he proposed with Nathalie Watteyne the collective essay Brault’s precariousness (Nota Bene) ; 2023 will have its own precariousness.
France, September 27
Love like so many fractures
Nathalie Nadeau
Exploring the love of seven famous couples, this project may seem ambitious in a single collection. We will have to see how Nathalie NadeauIn Love like so many fractures, will succeed in tackling those between Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen, Dora Maar and Picasso, Pauline Julien and Gérald Godin, etc. Different times, different concerns evoke the difficulties that these people encountered. The author warns us that she does not want to remain faithful to biographical contingencies, but that she takes “impressionist” liberties with regard to her choices. We are offered this example of the Ihlen-Cohen relationship: “There without knowing why, I want to be afraid with you, Marianne. To let us fall further into the void. […] We are poets enough to believe it. Dreamy enough to fall asleep there. »
Hammock, September 12
Supersensible sensitive thing
Melanie Landreville
“Your brother killed himself,” the mother said over the phone. Is this enough for the soul to fail, for the disarray to begin? In Supersensible sensitive thing“what is buried risks exploding alive”. Melanie Landreville will then dig into the human soul, one of those souls which already found the world covered in violence by a heavy patriarchal force. Death adds to this moral disintegration. The link between the one who lives and the suicide, the sister and the brother, takes refuge in their common name. However, “it is nothing a surname / a distress in the middle of the face / a remains / a carnage / a lie”, because this sharing hides above all what is called “the tyranny of the father”.
Red Herbs, October 3
The cut flower market
Sarah-Louise Pelletier-Morin
There is a risk in wanting to attack the figure of the flower, in order, perhaps, to exhaust its occurrences. We will have to see, because this collection would stand on the side of extraordinary tenderness. The cut flower market would therefore not focus on the mutilation of the living plant stem, but rather on the symbolic aspect of the blooming flower. The most attractive thing about this proposal, at first glance offbeat, is the poet’s desire to “deconstruct[re] the traditional metaphor which associates flower and woman”. She took on a specific duty: “Invent what you need to live. » Let’s admit that in these times of dereliction, it is not common to take refuge in beauty. Let us hope that this first collection of Sarah-Louise Pelletier-Morin opens to the discovery of an important new voice.
La Peuplade, November 8