Words to mouth
Echo chambers, a great work of memory, “enters the state of grace of something beyond speech, when the raw materials of the earth were given to the hospital body by means of the senses”. Material thought, the melodic sensuality of words, the seriousness of living the senses accumulate in Paul Chanel Malenfant, open to inner voices, heady sounds, just to hear the coming of “melancholy”. Malenfant stands up to completion, survives through the objects that come to his mind as well as at hand, his eye attentive to feel, to see, to listen to the rustle of vowels and days.
His latest collection summons the dead and their precious objects, the sentence taking the place of an altarpiece, is bewitched as we hear it rise in Bachelard when he leans, also an essayist-poet, on The imagination of matter Or on The poetics of reverie.
Book of a lucid tenderness with regard to childhood on the go, disturbed by the imagination (“When I write, I invent myself”, he specifies) as by the too great cruelty of the world forced to light , overwhelmed by the crash. Malenfant holds his sorrows and joys at close range, in a maelstrom swept away by nostalgia as much as by fear in the face of the death of hours and others, of childhood as well as of loved ones.
Above all, the poet must resist, that he never “mourns for existing”, because “the death of the poem would put an end to thought”. This “relentless living” confides: “Objects, in the order of dreaming and writing, are for me words, fetishes with which I will be, no doubt all my life, a mad lover. “
While he says that ” [l]’childhood is everywhere ”, the poet will guide us towards“ blind walls ”, while an unexpected vehemence is unleashed there, a breaking wave in front of the atrocities of the world, until leading“ [l]’walking man’ to proclaim “Goodbye I stay”, while despair is over, the poet is invaded by “the sentences of distress in the night”. Resolved to this ineluctable loneliness, since “loneliness cannot be seen. / It’s an absence bearing the weight of the earth ”, he was led, book after book, to remake the world, his world. Here is a collection that has all the appearance of a sum, that which a long work can bring to life in a remarkable way through the eyes.
Acknowledgement
Fiorella Boucher, in The slaughterhouse is our home, identifies his reunion with his grandmother. This is the first collection of the author, who lives and writes in Montreal, but who was born in Córdoba (Argentina) to a Guarani-Paraguayan mother and a French father. This book sometimes gets lost in a daily life, as it is fashionable to impose it nowadays, sometimes confusing what is important and the small importance of its myself-I.
But what is stated in poems is often written below the poetic factor, without the effort that it requires. How not to remember this remark: “I am not afraid / of becoming old // I was born / I was already old”? There is not the poem. Whereas, in a very similar style, a certain gap is created: “when my father died / I could see the beauty of my mother”. The space between the words here imposes a double reading which says the discovery of “beauty” as such, finally released, and that of “the mother”, finally unveiled.
This collection is clarified by escapes from the more emotional side of grief. For example, this subtle description of the belonging between the grandmother and her granddaughter, found after a long trip: “she looked at me for a while from afar / to better tell me / my daughter / she me” stroked the bottom / very gently / she colored my skin / I didn’t understand how / she did that. Some successes of this caliber sometimes shed light on writing.
Overwhelmed
“Women, your body is a place, that’s where the violence was born. This is how the hard core of Claudie Bellemare’s first collection could be summed up. We were the nerves dreaming of a riot imposes a wave, made up of frontal violence suffered by women. The poet proceeds to the ceremonial description of the clashes and misfortunes which lead them to identify with objects of suffering, in barbaric cults.
The poet’s gaze, however, remains of a formidable coldness, counting the massacres, describing this disaster of being thus marked: “I arrive here prostrate, judged, raped, force-fed with murmurs, flowers and blowjobs. Marked with hairs and cuts, I come to myself exhausted, my jaw bones sprawled on the ground. »We think of the collections of Catherine Lalonde, Cassandra and Foreign body, which otherwise had dug the furrow.
Or again at Necessarily fucking of France Théoret, who had identified the simple act of walking in a street as the dangerous bringing to trial of a woman. However, the difference with these previous courses, is that, without exit, “here, the common blood is called massacre, the failure.” Moreover, and in many aspects, this collection is terribly effective. The poet affirms: “we are lost”. Thus, the accumulation of disastrous scenes ends up harming the subject.
The hatched, panting style of these proses contributes to this trembling of the voice, until the final part which summons the woman to asylum, to restraint, to her total guardianship, identified as crazy. The fact remains that, despite a kind of logorrhea that it would have been better to control, it is a beautiful entry into poetry.