je me réclame du vertige, Geneviève Dufour
Hashtag, 2023
In her debut collection, je me réclame du vertige (“I am of vertigo”), the Québec City poet Geneviève Dufour sings the ill body with a loving, sad ballad. The collection is tight, long enough to allow for echoes and a sense of progression, and wound together in a way that maintains focus. By placing the poems at the bottom of the page, she lets thoughts gather and allows the words to fall rather than raise them up. The effort of writing, of moving even, though clearly present, is not immediately perceived. It is after a second and third reading – which the length of the book makes possible – that a fuller meaning begins to show itself across the poems and that the full force of the collection gathers.
Dufour describes vertigo, pain, exhaustion, but also slowness and hesitation, as well as the hard-gained awareness that their absence, just like the decision to willfully ignore them, is a matter of moments that will often come with their return as a consequence. The ill body here is being before it exists, it shapes her capacities: (“molle et malléable / j’ai été sculptée / résiliente,” 41). It also connects the speaker uneasily to her mother, who plays the double role of caregiver and caring person who must be reassured.
We can see a certain arc in her descriptions, a worsening of a condition where neither hope nor despair are permitted, even over a few pages:
“often I walk so slowly / that summer steps over me” (“souvent je marche si lentement / que l’été m’enjambe,” 14)
“I’ve forgotten / the colour of fire / my bubble wrap room / pops / with each movement” (“j’ai oublié / la couleur du feu / ma chambre papier bulle / éclate / à chaque mouvement,” 23)
“I’m being lugged around in a wheelchair / I’m parked at the red light / ants climb up on me / I welcome them I say / hello” (“on me trimballe en fauteuil roulant / je suis stationnée au feu rouge / les fourmis me grimpent dessus / je les accueille je leur dis / bonjour,” 36)
and again:
“the future just like ping pong balls / that flee under the table” (“le futur pareil aux balles de ping-pong / qui s’enfuient sous la table,” 73)
“I’ll never be able / to visit the Moon” (“je ne pourrai jamais / visiter la Lune,” 77)
The most striking aspect of this book is Dufour’s ability to move through images and metaphors, from the hyperreal to the surreal. Pain is notably difficult to describe and, while we can communicate many aspects of our symbolic and emotional lives – as she does consistently well – pain itself remains outside the range of even the most. The play on reality then serves as much to unanchor the reader from their own corporeality as to pull them toward the existential weight of illness:
“to run in a three-piece suit / between two walls of glass” (“courir en veston-cravate / entre deux murs de verre,” 22)
“in the basement lay the ashes / of me at seven years old / they are children who grow up / in wet sand” (“au sous-sol reposent les cendres / de mes septs ans / elles sont des enfants qui grandissent / dans le sable mouillé,” 41)
“my head on sale / on a grocery store shelf / that’s what frightens me” (“ma tête à rabais / sur une tablette d’épicerie / voilà ce qui m’effraie,” 57)
“airplane hearts in the esophagus / I wonder how I could reach / the plants that inhabit me” (“coeurs d’avion dans l’oesophage / j’ignore comment atteindre / les planètes qui m’habitent,” 78)
Dufour accompanies such stylistic liberties with a warning to poets: “I condemn the use of vertigo / as a figure of speech / mine is not dreamy / it identifies itself neurological and central / it soils the everyday my character / in a cadence of dashes lost / identity” (“je condamne l’utilisation du vertige / comme figure de style / le mien n’est pas rêveur / il s’identifie neurologique et central / macule le quotidien mon caractère / en traits cadencés identité / perdue,” 13).
Of course, the writer is never entirely her speaker. Yet the relationship to her own body, as shifting as it is, remains at the centre of the poetics; we feel a non-fictive presence. Dufour often has recourse to a change in setting of her experiences, placing everyday pains and encumbrances into the world and interacting with it at a different genre of distance:
“my armour crumbles / on the side of the street”
“I am a bicycle wheel / a hallway-woman / a tire pushed by a child”
“I am many / my cheek dotted with swallows / shards of vertigos disperses / on baseball fields”
“I am the streetlight / that goes out / when we walk underneath”
“mon armure s’émiette / en bordure de la rue” (32)
“je suis une roue de bicyclette / une femme-corridor / un pneu poussé par un enfant” (37)
“je suis nombreuse / ma joue parsemée d’hirondelles / éclats de vertiges dispersés / sur les terrains de baseball” (46)
“je suis le lampadaire / qui s’éteint / quand on passe en dessous” (61)
Yet these are as many ways of bringing the world into the body, of tugging at the interplay of body and world and making a bit more room for the self to find some room and balance.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana
kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, is now 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.
