Séjour à Belle-Côte, Rose Després
Prise de parole, 2022
Over seven collections, the Acadian poet Rose Després has developed a voice that reaches the extremes of social emotions. Rough, biting, and harsh, it can also be soft, pillowy, welcoming. In the diction and in the percussive attack she favours, and in the respite she creates in moments of tenderness and connection, Després voices revolt.
Her uncommon voice and voicings, and Despré’s skill and precision in their use, are likely the reason why a recent article on her new collection, Séjour à Belle-Côte, describes it as the harshest, or most difficult to read among her books. For those who want a quiet, enjoyable read, or a peaceful meditation, this collection will certainly be difficult. Yet even the poet Chloé Laduchesse, her editor at Éditions Prise de parole, who is no stranger to such sharp writing, shares this reaction. The poems here are indeed demanding, although I would hesitate to call them dense. Simply, its demands are those of struggle.
The political lessons Després offers are not tactical, nor are they ideological. Her writing is political in abstraction of politics. She eschews knowledge and theory, she does not aim to teach; she recounts, tells the violence as well as the love that are experienced in the company of others. She whittles away the concrete, situated aspects of political experience, so that solely its sharpness is transmitted. And this latest collection goes the furthest in this direction.
Looking at her previous two collections, also published with Prise de parole in Sudbury, we see other advances, and instances of this balance between harshness and love – a balance that tilts toward the former, as befits revolt.
In 2009’s Si longtemps déjà (So Long Already), Després juxtaposed fright and plenitude, with the latter remaining untouchable. This short collection is dazzling and biting, comforting but not soothing – it is an invitation to everything that might develop this sense of plenitude, or protect it: “our children await / their mouths / watering with the revitalizing / blazes to come” (“nos enfants attendant / l’eau revifiante / à la bouche / des incendies à venir,” 43). Després sees “the drunken audacity of a new fraternity” (“l’ivre audace d’une nouvelle fraternité,” 54) emerging within those who had been drowsy, indulgent, coupling images of springs and fire so that joy may be palpable.
Després deepened this work of
juxtaposition in Vraisemblable
(2013), continuing her meditation on violence and struggle, on relationships in
their midst, and on difficult joys and forbidden desires. Here she interspaces
the French text with many passages in English, one of which summarizes her
political approach: “We pretend submission / in momentary increments / emulate
surrender / and the too small reprieves // [...] we charge headlong / into
someone else’s folly” (“Aimer,” 80). Throughout this intense collection,
refusal and struggle open onto liberation and rebirth.
As was the case for these two previous books, the title of Després’s newest collection is misleading, creating a tension with the contents of the poems. “A Stay at Belle-Côte” hints at travel, at a longer stop between other locations, perhaps at a peaceful moment. Belle-Côte is a Cape Breton Acadian community, but it is also the name of other locations along the coast of the Acadian peninsula. But the poems are set outside of this restful temporality, and Belle-Côte might also refer simply to Després’ home. The “stay” might then be a humble way of referring to a life that is limited in time, to an attachment in place. Després brings together a sense of serenity – or serene irony – to her revolt. The titles of some of the poems create a similar distance between what is said and how it is named. “Tracer la carte d’un nouvel espoir” (“Tracing the map of a new hope,” 79) focuses on subsequent forms of destruction, hope being a necessity rather than an open possibility. Rather than a picture of a beloved dog, “Mon chien n’a que trois pattes mais toutes ses dents” (“My dog only has three legs but all his teeth,” 84-85) offers a scene of desiring crowds on the brink of being attacked. Given these distances within poems and between the title of the book and its poems, it is not surprising that the book reads like a collection without a strong thematic thread, even as it includes recurring themes and an overall sense of anger alternating between dismay and hope.
The political strength of Després’s poems lies in their going beyond the denunciation and condemnation of violence. Instead, they lay it bare, leaving only one possible judgment. In “familias,” she points to the violence done to children, and draws the contours of residential schools and other abuses committed by members of the clergy: “because since then / it’s a transparent apartheid / a generational cork / of despicable plagiarisms / of sequestered everydayness / reality aborted also // where alone survives / the reincarnation / of stillborn children” (“car depuis / c’est l’apartheid transparent / le bouchonnement générationnel / de plagiats infâmes / de quotidiens séquestrés / le réel lui aussi avorté // où seule survit / la réincarnation / des enfants morts nés,” 14). She is at her best when she does not directly address a social problem, and situates herself instead within the most metaphorical register. But we also see her own judgments and positions and her empathy for the distress of others when she writes on migrant lives and deaths, on abuses committed by the church.
Després does not comment, nor does she speak any “truth.” She traces, makes visible the destruction brought by climate change and its selfish causes, the destruction brought by “their” wars to which she opposes “our” struggles (21), showing the cleavages that already exist because of this violence. She also gives us to see the difficulty and weight of resistance, the uncertainty not only of its outcome, but of the kind of person is formed through it (“while the heavy weight of a resistance,” “tandis que le poids lourd d’une résistance,” 59). And she writes in grief, within grief, as for her sister (“for a single dazzled look,” “pour un seul regard ébloui,” 38) and others she names, deepening the sense of loss that a common past resistance seems to heighten. In this particular poem she evokes a longing for the beauty of childhood, a hope that the peace of childhood might come after death – an after and a before of these struggles:
you are finally
free
of the perfidious
planetary gloomeries
those that brought
even greater waves and winds
and flight
to your already
distraught nature
a life dismembered
ruined
you are bathing
finally in the cleared waters
you swim with the
dolphinian children
we were
in our salutary
oceans
tu es enfin libre
des perfides maussaderies planétaires
celles qui rendaient encore plus houleuse
et fugitive
ta nature déjà désemparée
une vie démembrée
ruinée
tu bagines enfin dans les eaux éclaircies
tu nages avec les enfants dauphines
que nous étions
dans nos océans salutaires (38)
As Després places herself firmly between these extremes, the figure of the vigil or sentry and the theme of vigilance are present throughout, in their full ambiguity, sometimes appearing in all the danger they represent for those simply attempting to live their lives, sometimes emerging as necessary in order to protect these lives. What might be its opposite, the figure of the mole, is present in the title of three consecutive poems one third into the collection: tunneling, mining, living “a sandy life” (“une vie sablonneuse,” 26), moving in dangerous terrains and gases, being unearthed. The mole is no more an unambiguous figure than the sentry: in the struggle against war, there are no neutral roles. Adding to these figures and perhaps above them, Després adds ventriloquists, eagles, hawks. “We” appear as puppets, but she also identifies herself with turtle doves and with pterodactyls (80), which suggest other ways to see from above which maintain an access to several horizons, without brutality or hierarchy: “I would have looked over / the velvety jungles” (“j’aurais surplombé / les jungles veloutées,” 80).
The warlike figures above relate to those she names “yelles” and “zeux,” which I might translate as “themz,” always in the plural, and who might be “shez” and “yhe” in the singular. Also present in past collections, they are those who want too much and always want more – jealous, envious, prepared to betray or sacrifice others or themselves. They are “shrill shrikes / robbers of peaceful mornings / screechy waders of red ponds / troubling blood red” (“pies grièches / voleuses de matins paisibles / criardes pataugeuses des mares rouges / rouge sang troublant,” 65); they “nibble on the breathing of others” (“grignotent la respiration des autres,” 72).
Against the violence she gives us to see and feel and this sense of being outnumbered by all these enemies, Després shares a utopian vision. This utopia is not a political programme; it is found in what is already indicated in existing relationships, in experience. The title of one poem, “marcher plus doucement désormais” (“to walk more softly from here on out,” 17) sounds like the expression of a desire for a new way of being, allowing for the peace and tenderness that comes with the touch of others and the humming of songs – a vision of being reborn, “unmuzzled” (“démuselée,” 58), where the furthest stars and the oldest mythological figures find new life within.
[Read three poems from Séjour à Belle-Côte]
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.