Le hoquet en pulpes, Éloïse Leblanc
La Maison en feu,
2022
Éloïse Leblanc’s collection Le hoquet en pulpes (“Hiccup in Pulp”) is full of enigmatic, vibrant images, beginning with the impossible image of the title which mixes texture, taste, and involuntary movement. Her poems often deal in extremes, placing side by side hiccups and shouts, suggesting the involuntary nature of the latter and the all-encompassing nature of the former: “sitting on the bare ground / held up by a single hiccup // the shape my shout takes on” (“assise à même le sol / prise d’un seul hoquet // la forme que prend mon cri,” 121).
The relationships between the speaker and those she addresses (as one would address people who are absent) are messy. They are both too close and too distant; the poems captures them in the moment of their undoing:
if we keep
unravelling the asymmetrical hem of our eyes
we’ll end up
gathering my lashes left
in your workshop
and your pulp
under my bench
we’ll triangulate
our hands
whistle softly
in fields of ground cherries
à force de découdre l’ourlet asymétrique de nos yeux
nous recueillerons mes cils laissés
dans ton atelier
et tes pulpes sous mon banc
nous triangulerons nos mains
siffloterons
dans les champs de cerises de terre (137)
The collection as a whole is a similar mixture of abstraction and extreme concreteness, the poems short like hiccups, offering scenes of daily life through a fisheye lens. The focus on detail, on the immediate and the sensory diverts our attention from events, relationships, and emotions – and perhaps shields the speaker from anything other than vague sentiment and sensory stimulation by keeping her from experiencing the elements of long-term existence.
This great focus contrasts with the narrative that lets its presence be known around the poems without guiding them: the collection is made up of short poems that form a story through their juxtaposition, united through sections that feel more like chapters, each focusing on a theme rather than events. With the lack of reading directions (which I welcomed), I was tempted to read the book following its description, which sets up plot and characters and gives an identity to the uncertain “I” and the indefinite singular and plural “you.” I was also tempted to approach the collection through Leblanc’s poetic heritage and her Master’s thesis on resistance in Acadian writing. However, these would only be attempts to explain the poems – attempts that would take away from the dynamics of clarity and blurriness we find in Leblanc’s book, a book which demands a different, tactile kind of attention.
The speaker alternates between addressing a “you” that is attached to citrus, tends to them, eats them; addressing a “you” that seems to refer to other, different persons, but with more distance, where sex is certainly at play; and speaking from an indefinite “we” that is at times the subject of domesticity (that of a family, or a couple), at times alludes to a deep friendship and closeness, but seems cut off from many of the “you” who populate the poems.
A motif runs through the poems: like orange or citrus juice spreading on a page or through the book itself, Leblanc filled her lines with oranges, clementines, pomelos, grapefruit, and generic citrus. While another person tends to them, seeming quite taken with them, they do not appear as objects of bitter contempt or sour resentment; quite to the contrary, there is affection in the manner this person cares for them, and delectation as the speaker holds them, feels them, eats them. The speaker herself is closer to rhubarb, which appears as symbol of solitude, a desire to cook down the bitterness to preserve something for the future. The two relationships to fruit are summed up: “my citrus are in sorrows / and I rhubarb easily” (“j’ai l’agrume en peine / et la rhubarbe facile,” 26).
The sentiment of solitude is reinforced by the frequent use of conjugated verbs without a subject, which given some of the oddities of French grammar and the poetic habits of inversion, creates indecision as to whether we have a second-person order that is given, or a first, or third person description: “oscillate(s) the attic hatch // dread the moment when you will come down by the spiral staircase” (“oscille la trappe du grenier // redoute le moment où tu descendras par l’escalier en colimaçon,” 31).
This indecision as to who exactly is present with the speaker, or to whom the speaker is speaking, of whom she is speaking, runs throughout the poems, and allows Leblanc to explore the disintegration not so much of specific relations, but in relationality itself.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, 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 various social media under variations of @lethejerome.