The first rampart before the abyss
“ [P]apa, he is neither my father nor yours / he is a figure to be seen again together”, writes Olyvier Leroux-Picard in his most recent collection, Sun without hours. In this river poem, the poet combines enchantment, helplessness and frustration to get through the dazzlingness of a first year of fatherhood. In an alloy of tenderness, love and errors, he surveys the figure of the father with the desire to reincarnate her, while recognizing the numerous challenges that subjugate his will: “we will have to push our limits / at the very moment when we we will discover them. » In the unexpected tantrums that lack of sleep and helplessness engender — “I don’t know if the child is causing the anger; / it reveals the depth / I mean the story” — we sometimes recognize The tendon and the bone, by Anne-Marie Desmeules. Dazzling like a sun that follows a sleepless night, powerful like the cry of a newborn and fertile like arms that discover a new love.
Yannick Marcoux
Sun without hours
★★★★
Olyvier Leroux-Picard, Bush Poets, Montreal, 2023, 54 pages
Hail Marie-Victorin
In the introduction to the 1964 edition of their work Names of Quebec weeds, Maurice Ferron and Richard Cayouette note that the numerous vernacular variations of plants have “given our language words with a real poetic flavor”. Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf also smelled the poetic density, intrinsically linked to our language and our territory, of this generous nomenclature. Her Weeds is more of a ready-made literary than a collection of poetry, but this list of the “weeds” of Quebec, even in alphabetical order, displays a dizzying beauty, evoking flowers of evil as far as the eye can see, a rebellious and resilient life, a botanical and linguistic richness . A field of words, here, is enough in itself, populated by “frog shit”, “climb to the ass”, “ponceau aster”, “farfara coltsfoot” and “swimming hornwort”. For a bit, you would think you could hear Claude Gauvreau getting drunk in a bed of wild flowers.
Yannick Marcoux
Weeds
★★★
Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf, Le laps, Montreal, 2023, 48 pages
Perplexed vision
If “ecosexuality” intrigues you, if “the transfemininity of rivers” puzzles you, this collection is for you. This degenerate poem would be a “composting job”! Let us recognize that we do not do better in the abstruse. However, we must not trust it, because we must contact the poetry of Névé Dumas, who presents himself as a “white Franco keb”, and approach “this incarnate language / and its incarcerated voice / [qui] speak a damp language / which sticks to the eyes and the palate. We will no doubt object to a propensity towards psychopop, a naturo-saving tendency, but, fortunately, the interest is in a vitality of free verse which would be quite sufficient in itself, without the dross of essentialist messages. It is often very beautiful, like this “still dreaming of a cedar soup / of crystals and nuggets of language”. The deep concern that supports the statement requires great lucidity, a desire for resistance that wins. “I occupy my time / as one occupies a continent / I take care of its long anxious bank / and I end up falling asleep / little dark plant / which works hard / to internalize / the future. »
Hugues Corriveau
Degenerate poem
★★★
Névé Dumas, The Goose of Cravan, Montreal, 2023, 88 pages
Poetic reminiscence
There is no age to publish your first collection of poetry. Proof of this is that Ginette Andrée Poirier already won the National Prize for Seniors in 2011, then the Piché Prize in 2015. Under the banner of Pierre Reverdy, The certainty of lilacs claims the finesse of a noble writing drawn from the crucible of beautiful style, not hesitating, if necessary, to advise others well: “in order to rediscover the momentum / which reveals the morning / draws from the wind / the secrets of apple tree / to this space in you / which has never stopped quivering. » The memories are of seasides, of shells, of the mother’s gestures, where there, a little like Proust, “everything is suspended from the perimeter of the lamps”, “a blue porcelain cup in the hands. » Rare are these moments of grace when a poetry that we thought was obsolete returns to us, but whose delicacy of tone and images revives a feeling of peace that we thought was lost. In these terrifying times, this poetry of a slow nostalgic flow comes like a balm and makes us think of these distant writings from which this song returns.
Hugues Corriveau
The certainty of lilac
★★★
Ginette Andrée Poirier, Écrit des Forges, Trois-Rivières, 2023, 68 page