De chacun des jours, Isabelle Courteau
Éditions
Pleine Lune, 2024
In her latest collection, De chacun des jours (“Of each of the days”), Isabelle Courteau returns to some of the central images of poetry – night, light, air, breath, words, perspectives, and paths, most notably – and sheds them of the layers of versification that have attached themselves to them over the last centuries. She lets the images appear, uncomplicated and weightless, in short, direct poems. Although set in verse, they strictly obey the rules of punctuation and grammar. Each could be read out loud in one breath, as one breath. Yet these poems avoid the density of haiku. They have the energy of butterflies, the relation to space of a person who looks up from a table or desk to a window and gazes out between thoughts.
The collection’s sections are as brief as their titles are straightforward: “Time without primer,” “An obscure daylight,” “The freedom of leaves,” “Mobility” – each contains just over a dozen poems. The artworks on the cover and within the book, pastels by Françoise Sullivan, give the same bright calmness, the same presentation of clear elements that functions without filling in the whole page or even whole thoughts.
The poems themselves are light. This lightness gives us lines like “This gone-away presence / inflicts pain” (“Cette présence en-allée / fait souffrir,” 39); “False ideas crack high above / like a hazelnut’s shell” (“Les fausses idées craquent en l’air / comme la coque d’une noisette,” 28); or “To be reborn infinitely / as in a hollow within a wide basin” (“Renaître à l’infini / comme en creux au sein d’une large vasque,” 54).
Courteau’s poems are material: they can be felt, their texture being both vocal and oral, and soft, cool to the touch. They are to be read like we hold objects that excite our hands, felt without design or instruction, their shape espoused, their contours explored. Reading them places us entirely in the moment – a moment that is at once Courteau’s and ours.
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.