Jacky,
Virginie Beauregard D.
L’Oie de Cravan, 2025
As I found myself fanboying among a small crowd of friends and readers late at night in the Port de tête bookstore on the Plateau during The Montreal International Poetry Festival – living a bit of a fantasy for a French-speaking poet living in Regina – between other readings by other poets whose names I’d also held dear for many years, I almost cried during Virginie Beauregard D.’s reading of Jacky. I told her at the break; I already knew I’d need to spend time with the collection. And I did, and the same parts of me unravelled at the same place. I’ll keep that one to myself, if only to see whether other readers might have similar experiences elsewhere.
The four poems that make up this small book drip and flow lightly through the pages. They share a calm tenderness, expressions of love and care for others and from others. They convey a full-bodied but bearable tiredness, a slight sadness that knows the inevitably of what must pass.
Each of the poems is a chronicle of intimacy. Small gestures, furtive thoughts, partial touches nourished by previous touches. Yet this intimacy maintains a mystery. The titles, poems in themselves, help build it: “The smallest closed room that’s ever been seen” (La plus petite pièce fermée que l’on ait jamais vue), “The sun always rises in the middle of the show” (Le soleil se lève toujours au milieu du spectacle), and a simple apostrophe. The book is small, almost square, the words printed in a red so dark it is almost purple, the ink blurring very slightly on the edges without sacrificing precision – a thing of beauty:
my tears
flow back up the cracks
in the floor
to my eyes’ shores
waves crash
on our piece of land
our stolen paddle
Water appears after this passage, and periodically, as if to preserve, to heal and keep calm, often failing to fulfill its promises but losing nothing of its attraction. Things, places, body parts are burning or burning up. Night enters through a light well, light pierces through materials and is confused – perhaps – for love. So much is broken:
I look for nature
but here there’s only
the city’s fractured
windowpane
where the snow is just so tired
Yet I can’t help but find the collection hopeful. Perhaps it’s because of my memory of a voice that had known but did not carry despair. But perhaps it’s that the movement of return and the undercurrents of love that hold the poems together also bring their tone upward, not toward a resolution, but to a continuation.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will recently out with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.
