Cette peur précise, Joanie Serré
Perce-Neige,
2022
The line “this precise fear,” which serves as a title to Joanie Serré’s first book of poetry, follows a repetition of the imperatively stated words “drown me.” “Drown me,” in unlikely and impossible places: “drown me nailed to the sand,” for example. The list is short, which gives it impact; the poem is short, as most are; and the book is short. But the books, like each of its poems, has an undertow: it is percussive, dizzying.
The book itself is mysteriously alluring. A dark cover features a giant paper boat in a bloody sea, a bright light or sun bringing no comfort or respite. There is no information about the author, save for her name. The poems make limited reference to the Acadian setting of their author's origins in Edmunston and of their publication with Perce-Neige, and include few references to any place at all, for that matter (Serré might also be seen as an Ottawa poet, given where her studies have taken her). The writing, bunched into the top left corner of each page, without titles and clear beginnings or endings, is delivered breathlessly, using the white space as a cushion.
The imagery borrows from the restrained surrealism that characterizes the best of Les Herbes rouges and the unrestrained but focused anger of Rose Després and Denise Desautels, all with a style that's already Serré's own:
fortunately it’s time to stir the
end of the world
galvanized by law forgetting becomes a permission
where our lines intersectheureusement c'est le temps de remuer la
fin du monde
galvanisé par la loi l'oubli devient une permission
où nos lignes s'entrecroisent (56)
This collection is almost a call to arms – but not quite. It is also not a scream, a series of punches, an act of rebellion or protest. Instead of an image to describe this feeling, the best I could do is to return to the title. The anger Serré expresses in her poems hits like the adrenaline rush of fear, a body violently reacting to the violence of a feeling, of a physiological state, of a situation, of someone’s action or their very being. This violence, the cause of this anger, is not named; it lives in the gaps between the words and the lines. It becomes something else.
It becomes a self, melding with it. A strong "je" stumbles, strikes, moves forward, stands her ground, rarely falling into the “nous.” There is a relationship between a “je” and a man in some poems, but no “we” or “us,” two people stuck between the third person imperative (“il faut”) and the third person singular-plural (“on”): “you and I / can’t cease to articulate / spasm fruit trace / the thoughts are unequal / the necessity of sinking” (toi et moi / on ne peut pas cesser d’articuler / spasme fruit trace / les pensées sont inégales / il faut sombrer, 43).
Serré favours the “on,” a familiar, third person manner of referring to a plural subject than the “we” that is more formal than everyday French will admit. This familiar register clashes with the decidedly poetic character of the language in the book as a whole, connecting it to everyday life.
In the pages where the speaker describes her mother and their relationship, the “nous” appears but in a parallel, disconnected, each performing the actions, each stuck in the “je” and the “elle”: “we are two / cockroaches with cannibal eyes with / a dry but / submissive spinal cord // we are two who are seeking / however I feel misled” (nous sommes deux / cafards aux yeux cannibales à / la colonne vertébrale sèche mais / soumise // nous sommes deux à chercher / pourtant je me sens trompée, 14). This sense of being deceived is reinforced by the beginning of the poem, where the mother is said to lie, to “speak like one writes,” a slight in her character even though the speaker likes “reversals / the erasure of my history” (les renversements, l’effacement de mon histoire). The difficulty of connecting with others permeates this collection, a difficulty compounded by the speaker’s preference for self-malleability and certainty in her relationships with at least some specific, privileged others.
Not without ties to these difficulties, there is also danger in these pages – here are just four examples within a ten-page span:
“neck attached to chance” (le cou attaché au hasard, 55)
“the racket of the mines cuts itself off from the landscapes” (le vacarme des mines se coupe des paysages, 58)
“the noose finds itself smooth with embraces” (le noeud se retrouve repassé d'étreintes, 59)
“her cigarette laid down among men’s petals” (sa cigarette déposée parmi les pétales des hommes, 65)
There is also a whole poem that plays on the urge to protect and destroy, beginning with “I cover you slaughter you” (je te couvre t’abats, 51). Another poem begins softly, with sleeping cats and a united planet, but ends with the harshest twist: the provocation of hatred.
This tension permeates the book, works immediately while also calling for multiple readings. The first section, perhaps contradictorily titled "Sea Foam" ("Écumes"), focuses thematically but far from solely on the relationship between mother and daughter. It is the most percussive, sonically as well as in the images it relays. The title "Les impairs," for the second section, refers to uneven numbers and, more likely here, to mistakes that come from misjudging a situation (as in “un impair”). Between these two meanings, “impairs” refers to the impossibility of being two, of being together or alone together, and this section explores sex crudely, in its distance from affection and love. A third section, titled “Parasites,” features a vague other addressed in the second person, and brings a heavy dose of self-awareness, the kind that’s like to make any relationship difficult. In the same register of togetherness, the following section, “Osmose” (osmosis), employs the vocabulary of war with subtlety and parsimony, but to great effect, to show the successes and failures of togetherness. And a last, very short section, “Au revers” leaves a feeling of something that has left, someone who has left, or been lost, navigating between nostalgia and melancholia, and urgency.
The strength of Serré’s poems comes from direct, short lines – so many jabs and stabs, of which we only get the movement, without origin or flesh for them to be inflicted upon. These are poems that do one thing at a time, admirably. In the abstraction of settings and actions, we get an extreme precision of feeling, an abundance of life. A sense that there is something else as well to this self who has every reason to battle but no opponent; or a sense that, at the very least, there might be something else than what is felt so sharply in these poems, something that is left once the adrenaline wears off, once the threat is identified and left behind.
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.