Du feu autour de
l’oeil, Hyam Yared
Mémoire d’encrier,
2025
Hyam Yared’s fifth poetry collection, Du feu autour de l’oeil (Fire around the eye) follows volumes, including novels, notably published in Beyrouth, Paris, and Montreal. It is published here by Mémoire d’encrier along with the previous collection to which it replies, Blessures de l’eau (Wounds of water). The book is at now stands, then, collects two collections, joining two inseparable but distant moments. Its poems ask how to live in conflict, and with conflict; with desire, and the desire for another’s desire.
The collection is philosophical, in the right way, in that it does not allow poetry to yield to argument. Though there is truth in her poems, Yared does not rely on it, does not give in to the Quixotic lack of adherence to reality and its consequences: “Truth is a thorn with which we vainquish / ghosts / in windmills” (La vérité est une épine avec laquelle on vainc des / fantômes / dans des moulins à vent, 64). Rather, she works at renewing meaning by going to its source, beyond its source. Here, that source is experience, and Yared feels for meaning with an “Odyssey of hands / that go further than the water” (Odyssée de mains / qui vont plus loin que l’eau, 123).
This holding back of argument-making and position-taking serves the poems especially since they confront a world that has ended, as the speaker looks to return to its origin. This looking back, this undoing of time, comes at a cost: being expulsed from time, backward, to its beginning, its primordial chaos, the chaos that precedes war and destruction. “Time does not exist for the poem,” Yared writes in the prologue. She pulls her poems from the past, from her own past poems and from what is forever separated from the present, pulls them beyond time as she turns experience inside out, inverts it.
There she can better show the lining of this experience: the body in love, the loving body, the body that lacks and desires, the body that lacks and feels the pain of disappointment, the body whose love is turned inside out to the point where it becomes war.
Thus the collection contains a running opposition between war and love – Yared having moved through both, notably in Lebanon. The author moves through life and sex, follows the passage of one person into another (and of a woman inside a man as well), uses a variety of sexual metaphors, all the while ensuring she differentiates loving sex from rape, sexual forwardness from sexual violence, loving domination from simple human domination. She does note their proximity and the contextual nature of their distinction: sex and life or violence are not directly opposed, there are no contradictions, anything can stand on anything else’s side, can be violated in analogous manners, can become what negates it.
Likewise, she plays on and against the duality of land and sky, oil and cloud, the sand of the sea and the sand of the dry soil. When of destruction she writes, “there are no destroyed cities / but rather cities cut off from their shores” (il n’y a pas de villes détruites / mais des cités coupées de leurs rivages, 60), we see to what great extent life can recede rather than be destroyed, become withdrawal rather than death. These proximal oppositions take on their full poetic strength as we move through the collection, jump backwards and forwards, find them on the same page or on opposite sides of the book, on opposite sides of time.
Such oppositions may be necessary when worlds are destroyed and lives ended, so that we can feel something like boundaries for moments and connections. Yet they are not sufficient, and Yared often pauses to consider method. She takes stock of the infinity of her task – “Nothing is more arduous in a sentence than what the motion / keeps from language” (Rien n’est plus ardu dans une phrase que ce que le geste / dérobe au langage, 28). She also is quite aware of its destructive potential: “Words are jails after which we are running. / With which we kill” (Les mots sont des prisons après lesquelles on court. / Avec lesquelles on tue, 48).
Even as the poems can be light in tone, they contain an infinite violence. The more time we spend with some of its lines, especially in relation with, or in distinction from, seemingly hopeful feelings, the more the inhumanity of war drags us down into its darkness – and with us, life as a whole: “Tell me / how to recognize childhood without that bullet lodged / in this skull, my father’s” (Dis-moi / comment reconnaître l’enfance sans cette balle logée / dans le crâne de mon père, 36).
Taken as a whole, the two collections refuse us any respite longer than a single poem. We are thrown from one image into another, suffer penetrations and lacerations, unions and deflagrations, smotherings and distant embraces, late-life conception of the self, and the becoming-hand of the poet, of the speaker, of anyone who speaks. There is too much to experience, especially in love and war and the love that takes place in spite of war and through it, in war that love cannot interrupt, for arguments and ideas to take us very far. We need each other, and we need poetry:
The sky is never where we
expect it. It is reality
that breaks the wings of
the seagulls. Before you
I was ambitious for a
land without its sky.
Since you, I am ambitious
for a sky without its land.
Between the two,
a tongue will do the
rest.
Poetry perhaps – this sky
after which a dream
chases
strangled with logic.
Le ciel n’est jamais où on l’attend. C’est la réalité
qui casse les ailes des goélands. Avant toi
j’avais l’ambition du ciel avec la terre en moins.
Entre les deux,
la langue fera le reste.
Peut-être la poésie – ce ciel
après lequel un rêve court
étranglé de logique. (32)
.jpg)
Jérôme Melançon writes
and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth
chapbook, avoice be heard, is now out with above/ground press, alongside
the previous three: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going
to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020). His most recent collections
are Prairial·es and En d’sous d’la langue, both with Prise de
parole. Let us not forget 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.
