Au passage du fleuve, Paul Chanel Malenfant
Le Noroît, 2024
The first time I heard Paul Chanel Malenfant read, I was overcome by the greatest sense of calm and wonder. I had the sharpest awareness that he was reading to us, of his presence, his solemn and airy voice, his accentuated and flowing reading. Much like certain storytellers do not disappear in their stories but instead walk with us alongside their narrative, he used his poems as a pretext to draw near us and carry us. His latest collection, Au passage du fleuve (Passing the River), gave me the impression he was reading to me. The poet is there, writing on the page just as I am reading, telling me something that is not a narrative yet borrows from storytelling, mixing impressionist poetry with the grave tone of one who is opening themselves to others in order to open them to experiences they couldn’t otherwise have known about. He is deliberate about writing:
Thus, I sort out the
syllables of winter hours
to experience the
sensation of time the beating
of the heart with each
sentence the passing pulsation
and the absolute
certainty of my disappearance
in the clarity of ink
when language sometimes
as it passes the river
illuminates it.
Ainsi, j’ordonne les vocables des heures d’hiver
pour éprouver la sensation du temps le battement
du cœur à chaque phrase la pulsation passagère
et l’absolue certitude de ma disparition
dans la clarté de l’encre quand le langage parfois
au passage du fleuve l’illumine. (96)
This is not the first time Malenfant lets himself be carried by the current of the great river (a fleuve being a river that leads to the sea). His first collection was Poèmes de la mer pays (Poems of the Sea Country, with HMH in 1976), and since then he had also published Fleuves (Rivers, Le Noroît, 1997). He mentions this frequent return to the St. Lawrence River in the pages that open and close the collection, both as an acknowledgment of the need for a return to the same places, the same waters, and to explain it.
In this new collection, writing is like attempting to steer or swim with the current, against the undertow and against treacherous obstacles. When describing his writing, Malenfant speaks of drifting, but his ability with language is such that we feel at every moment that he is allowing this drifting to take place. Yet there is no illusion of control. Some risk remains, but he is confident in his experience and practice. In the many poems within this collection that include reflections on writing and poetry, we receive the words of a guide who might also be describing rowing and paddling, not to give instructions or to prescribe, but to allow their passengers to develop a keener appreciation and understanding for the relationship that a person can build with water and its currents. The Rimouski native writes about the Bas-St-Laurent and Gaspésie regions of Québec as if they were surrounded by water, cut off from the rest of the continent, floating. Images surface slowly, compose themselves through rising proximity and the dissipation of fog, and the poems describe this process they support: “The time of copper is arriving. / The grey of the charcoal lifts. / The mist its own dimension” (Voici venir le temps du cuivre. / La grisaille du fusain s’efface. / La brume trompe l'œil, 49).
This time the river is moved by memory. Memories of the speaker’s parents, memory that confronts death, that is drawn to it, but in order to keep and tend to the life of the suicided and of the other deceased. We approach grief but feel no loss. Images and memories surface, whole and captivating, poignant, along the way. They have the consistency of objects; they are not fleeting but being immobile, they are quickly left behind.
A few poems especially struck me. One is so complete and wrapped around itself, wrapped around the collection and wrapped up inside it, that a full translation seemed inevitable, in addition to calling out to my voice among innumerable other voices:
Once the books have
vanished from within your memory
and Segalen’s shadows and
voices have drowned in the sea,
will you know to spurt
out, between seaweed and chaos,
between transhumance and
agony will you know to awaken
your dead, father and
mother reconciled in ash,
will you know to lead to
slumber in your drowsy soul
as a nightlight, the
melancholy of being in the world?
Without a reprieve. Without a future.
Untitled like all poems in the collection, it appears on page 109, late in the collection and toward the end of a section where much of the emphasis is placed on the father. Malenfant weaves through these poems the figures of the father and mother, as well as those of his father and mother, usually separately. He moves between their pasts, their deaths, their presences and absences to each other and mostly to him, and the archetypes and desires that are parents, abstracted from their lifetimes and his.
Another leads into itself, unfurls itself as an extension of its question, of its life, of the experiences it focuses, making explicit the ontological concerns of the collection, on page 50:
My heart lifts the stardust, the question of origins, then faints.
I see figurines of distressed girls between veils of rain shaken over the horizon. I hear the lapping of the tongue deep within the empty shells. I witness the crumbling of daily gestures between the walls.
Vocal cords are untangled on the sound-table, in front of the stones that were set on the shore, among the sea buckthorn.
Malenfant’s relationship to the flow of water is tumultuous, sometimes hidden and only felt, and at times conflictual: “I am subjected to the violent heart of things. At the mixing up of chaos and echo, at the abolition of the rumour of the water” (Je suis soumis au cœur violent des choses. Là où se confondent le chaos et l’écho, où s’abolissent les rumeurs de l’eau, 63.)
To this subjection Malenfant mixes an adaptive resistance, swimming or rowing where the current will let him decide to go, maintaining his capacity to move and so live – just like he writes to maintain his voice: “I write river with words of rain on windowpane, in search of echoes and glimmer, so I do not lose my voice within the insanity of massacres to the soil of my era” (J’écris fleuve avec des mots de pluie sur la vitre, en quête d’échos et de lueurs, pour ne pas perdre ma voix dans la folie des massacres au terreau de mon époque, 26).
To say that the writing in this collection is exquisite might be unfair to poems that are so often solid, and so well anchored in shores and riverbeds. It is certainly beautiful, in the way a river can be beautiful during grey days just as in the sunlight that makes it shimmer, but especially at moments when the weather changes and it unveils all its possibilities at once.
[see Jérôme Melançon's translation of four poems by Paul Chanel Malenfant here]
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), in addition to several published and ongoing translations of poems, academic texts, and archival documents. He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this, notably on settler colonialism in Canada. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.
