“Tomorrow is a long-term project / when you know what living / contains tears”, writes Emmanuelle Riendeau in Domain of Resta funeral oration for his father, full of the conflicting feelings that the death of a magnificently imperfect loved one provokes.
Posted at 8:00 a.m.
In 2018, Emmanuelle Riendeau burst (the expression is not chosen at random) on the poetic scene with Uninhibited, and rarely has a collection borne its title so well. After getting noticed at several reading evenings thanks to her performances, which she seemed to deliver with the absolute fear that anyone would leave talking about someone other than her, the poet let the poet guess wrote an undeniable vulnerability, but camouflaged it under a thick smell of cheap beer and several layers of boastfulness.
With Domain of RestEmmanuelle Riendeau takes a step back and returns to the territory of her origins, a little as if, after bellowing Illegal and does a thousand stupid things in the streets of Montreal, the bum explained why it howls and burns so much inside. Pilgrimage to the places of his gray drummondvilloise childhood, diary of the decline of a man who granted himself no respite, investigation into the reasons why someone stubbornly tries to quench his thirst when he knows the bath has holes: this book questions the very possibility of not falling into line without sacrificing oneself, as well as that of tearing oneself away from the harshness of one’s environment, without tearing oneself away from oneself.
Longer, narrative-driven poems are thus interspersed with brief blocks of a few verses, worthy of being engraved on the walls of the toilets of the bar near your home (“what collapse do we talk about / when there is no ‘there never was an empire’). Freed from the effects of Franglais, the language of Riendeau provides those dizziness specific to the aphorism, while borrowing from the vocabulary of everyday life, Catholicism and FM radio.
Tribute to the father? Somehow. Without drawing a flattering portrait of the “madman of the Estate” that was her father, her daughter is not unaware that “it’s a game / untenable / we idolize / the dead / idealize the loss”. Custodian of a “hereditary tragedy”, he only has to “pray fiercely / a rosary hanging from the rearview mirror / a big one between the thighs / so that the patterns parents / do not take their ease / between our resolutions / friable”.
But we are here in poetry, not in a book of personal growth, and this is how Emmanuelle Riendeau refuses to empty her forty ounces in the sink and chooses instead to take, beyond her departure, a last drink with his father, heroic middle finger to the gentle strangulations of programmed obedience.
“We run in the streets / tear off the bracelets / cut the identity cards”, she proclaims as in a dream where death would represent the ultimate rupture with this society which feeds shame in those who refuse to join. What does it matter if she doesn’t want to live her father’s life or the one that consists of getting up every morning to be quiet?
Domain of Rest
Emmanuelle Riendeau
Noroît Editions
128 pages