Between flesh and ashes
In his most recent collection, Trapping Eternity, Mélanie Noël invited herself into the dance of others, listening to their life stories, to the throws of the dice of their death and to the unexpected jolts of their daily life: “I unlocked doors / to visit our hopes cloistered.” Through these other lives, perhaps there was an echo of his own: “you are a house / with a hundred windows / which looks out on us”. Each poem is a vignette, creating so many incisive and delicate portraits of incandescent beings. The work of the language is sober, but has this way of contemplating – and rendering -, in a few words, the memory of these existences, called to disappear: “our flesh / like a key to the neck / that we doesn’t want to lose.” The shock of these encounters is diluted by accumulation, but taken in small doses, this homage to ordinary hazards and the expected inevitability of destiny is poignantly tender and original.
Yannick Marcoux
Trapping Eternity
★★★ 1/2
Mélanie Noël, Écrits des Forges, Trois-Rivières, 2023, 106 pages
In the fertile offal of truth
Daniel Leblanc-Poirier’s pen does not wear out. The publication of his thirteenth title, Tonkinese maze —second collection of poetry this year — invites us into the iridescent intimacy that Jessica and the narrator nourish. A sort of amorous wandering of two beings who gravitate around a pho – “it is easy to lose your way in a Tonkinese soup” – the collection offers blocks of poetic prose with a chiselled rhythm, which intuitively imposes its breath on the reading. Crossed by magnificent images — “I can see alleys in the city center where dusk has cauterized its wounds” —, Tonkinese maze is part of the flexible and vibrant stride of the poet’s work, to the point that one wonders if he is not trampling on the same tiller, finding comfort in surveying the amorous subject again. His dazzling universe, whose metaphors brilliantly defy the expected, translates an enchantment which, as dazzling as it is, now seems to evoke tunes already heard.
Yannick Marcoux
Tonkinese maze
★★★
Daniel Leblanc-Poirier, Hands Free, Montreal, 2023, 66 pages
Talk about fragility
Between poetry and micro-story, this collection retraces with assumed tranquility moments of love, solitudes flowering with precarious sadness, the vagaries of time spent living. The question is precious when we seek our truth: “How to invent a heart / On the narrow path / From the bedroom? » Because this worry of not being adequate haunts this meditative collection: “When I draw a line / On the white paper / How can I not believe / That there is someone inside me? » Whether he goes to the store, whether he talks about his husband elsewhere, about his passing loves, the poet-storyteller knows how to find the right sound of the word to access the secret perceived in the passing whisper: “Which elsewhere / Has as much need / Of me / Only me? » This roaring solitude in his perception of the world, the author confronts it, let’s just say it, with kindness. This solitude tirelessly summoned means that he goes “To bed / Earlier and earlier / To displace the silence. » It’s very beautiful, often captivating, and above all it gives us a real writing project to read, a book in short.
Hugues Corriveau
The sharp edge of the day
★★★★
Charles Guilbert, Les Herbes rouge, Montreal, 2023, 128 pages
Living on Earth
When Vincent Lambert speaks of “the materials involved in the molding of sidewalks / and children”, or of his “indoor swimming pool”, or of the “simple-minded reflections of the moon”, he does not convince, either when he takes himself for a small-minded philosopher wondering if “it is better to be and say nothing than to speak without being”. No, the pleasure of this reading lies rather in the introspection which leads him to the edge of the abyss. In this suspended moment while he waits, “and the abyss that it makes is very beautiful”. It must be said that “there are moments like that, moments, / [qui] show us / who we are / and take away everything to say it.” As with Charles Guilbert, the poet devotes himself to the micro-narrative of a beautiful coming. At his young son’s bedtime, he explains: “I was going to turn it off, he said to me: I’m / quite sure that I can predict / half of the future / I said: for TRUE ? / and him: it’s going to be / at night / half the time.” Happy passage, poetry of confidences.
Hugues Corriveau
The third from the sun
★★★
Vincent Lambert, Le Quartanier, Montreal, 2023, 152 pages