Posted yesterday at 12:30 p.m.
With his most recent collection, The nail and the varnish, the great Nicole Brossard deploys “an aesthetic of the plural” where the poem becomes a “successful form of embrace”. The verses state truths that strike directly at the heart even though the poet says she never simplifies anything. “Only riddles keep their word,” she writes in a style that always knows how to surprise.
Nicole Brossard wields both intuition and technology, ephemeral nanoseconds and solitary eternity, the microscope and the telescope. She demonstrates an immeasurable understanding of what vibrates in us and surpasses us all at the same time.
His images can, in the same verse, comfort and worry us. She is a poet who allows herself to be crossed by “wars and corpses”, but whose fine intelligence allows her to take an almost analytical distance at the same time. His poems bend and reflect.
The collection approaches the evils of the world with the words of today without appearing, and it is there the great art and the relevance of Nicole Brossard, plated or even shifted. She offers, right in the middle of the book, a magnificent poem, This manuscriptwhich takes place as close as possible to the life of the poet.
The “I” then returns to demonstrate its ability to say everything in a few words: “In the present I am still / the same sentence and its silence / a form of condensation / mist of the universe”. His poetry acts as a filter of the spirit of the times, of his breaths as well as of his contaminations. A very current vocabulary and necessary neologisms are used as materials for a work that knows how to “feed its old childhood”. It works to describe the world since, opening up meaning, poetry is indeed the only form of expression that achieves this.
The texts of nail polish dialogue with the magnificent illustrations of Symon Henry. The poet is the nail that scratches by knowing where to find it, it is the varnish that colors what, of humanity, perhaps remains underneath.
Some might speak of an intergenerational exchange, but that would hide the fact that Nicole Brossard is ageless. She only has a small universal knife that cuts through life with a precision and clarity worthy of the greatest artists.
Let us mention that appears, at the same time, in France, Mauve Motel geometriesa captivating correspondence between Simon Dumas and Nicole Brossard about a novel by the latter, purple desert. This landmark book inspired a film script and a theatrical adaptation, but also an opera project by… Symon Henry.
nail polish
Nicole Brossard, with works by Symon Henry
Chillwind
104 pages