Jérôme Melançon : Au passage du fleuve, by Paul Chanel Malenfant

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.

Jérôme Melançon: Scaphandre, by Mélissa Labonté

Scaphandre, Mélissa Labonté
Le Noroît, 2024

 

 

 

 

The poems in Mélissa Labonté’s book Scaphandre are a series of explorations, discoveries that her speaker knows to be such only for her, forays into just barely charted territories. They take place within the relative safety afforded by the polysemic figure of the scaphandre – at once diving suit and space suit, a figure of courage and isolation. She is not the first to tread where she does, but her predecessors have not exactly opened the way to her.

This lack of a prepared environment and need for exploration comes from the uncertain path her predecessors have traced. As women, they have been left to die, prevented from exploring further, or prevented from exploring at all. In this shared condition, Labonté finds a kinship that allows her to avoid the analogical register. The designed death of Laika, the first dog in space, is thus the first in a series of examples of the disposability and expandability of female life, of the containment forced upon women, and of the experience of the arbitrariness of limits.

Much like we can imagine Laika alternating between staring at space through the window in her capsule and staring at her reflection, Labonté’s speaker spells out the murky experience of reflection and transparence as experienced throughout a seventy hour train ride:

beyond any doubt I still have a face
the reflection in the glass tells me so

in the tattered canopy, the sky demands I be
dispersed: my particles ripple

with waiting for an adequate form
the birds taunt me with agile insults

the dirty window welds us together – friendship
in the transparency of our heads in the blue

 

hors de tout doute j’ai encore un visage
le reflet de la vitre me le dit

dans la canopée en lambeaux, le ciel m’exige
dispersée : mes parcelles ondoient

en attente d’une forme adéquate
les oiseaux me narguent avec des insultes agiles

la fenêtre sale nous soude – amitié
dans la transparence de nos têtes dans le bleu (18)

Where Labonté does write in the analogical register, it is to further the proximity of the extreme experiences of Valentina Tereshkova, a Russian cosmonaut who went to space but then was prevented from going back, and of the Mercury 13, a group of women trained for a space flight but never allowed to join NASA’s program, with those of girls who are prevented from going into the forest is spite of their training and readiness, or those of women facing the possibility/ impossibility of giving life – or of living. The analogical register is then a conduit for proximity, allowing Labonté to eschew similarity in favour of a deepened description of what is at stake in each of these situations. For no situations is truly like the others, except for the fact that they are all manifestation of the same condition. In spite of everything they could learn,

that was not enough

they gave us our orders and sent us home
the world we had imagined
did not exist

cela n’était pas suffisant

ils nous ont ordonné de rentrer à la maison
le monde que nous avions imaginé
n’existait pas (90)

Yet Labonté moves through such observations without the slightest hint of resignation:

we resisted within the brushwood
of a secret language
under the dead light of the stars

nous avons résisté dans le branchage
d’un langage secret
sous la lumière morte des étoiles (91)

There, in a refuge – where it becomes clear that worlds do end – learning, training, new possibilities can continue. The move into space or more generally to spaces that are not well charted is akin to leaving society to find respite and new possibilities on the outside, in nature. The image of hiding or being stuck among leaves, branches, or trees returns on a few occasions, acting as a counter-weight to the oppressive openness of space.

It is likewise a shared animality that ties the speaker and more generally human women to animals that are rarely named or described – dogs, groundhogs, cats, bats, alongside leeches, spiders, bees, crickets and flies, but mostly simply and generically insects, birds, animals, or the word animal used as an adjective (and here I leave out the vegetal, also present throughout). Animality is what resists and, more importantly, what remains outside of the world and the forms of life that create such stifling limits to women. It is also what remains when the speaker is unsure of what is left of her, of still being a woman, of what it means to be a woman.

After all, the recurring motif of space calls in fact for rest, for an end to drifting and struggle:

I tend to the darkness and it finds its place
in the corners of rooms or eyes

to dream, to worry: the same undulation
on the morning’s wide collarbone

I thought of the pliability of the world respite
but depths offer me no rest

outside crumbles away, soon we’ll get a rainfall
perhaps the last snow

 

je soigne la noirceur et elle s’installe
dans les recoins des pièces ou des yeux

rêver, angoisser : un même ondoiement
sur la clavicule large du matin

j’ai pensé à la souplesse du mot accalmie
mais les profondeurs ne m’offrent aucun repos

dehors s’effrite, bientôt ce sera l’ondée
peut-être la dernière neige (72)

Through seven multi-pages poems, Labonté explores a single tone under different lights and pressures. Through quickly developed images she points to lasting emotions and, more than repetition, the recurrence of what this world asks of her. The same metaphor of the space suit and confined space is present, the same feeling of abandonment haunts the pages, the same concern for the immediate future defines the weight that slows the speaker down from moving forward, toward something else. The last poem, New Form of Life” (“Forme de vie nouvelle” – a clever play on what new life can mean here and in space and on utopia desire), is like the hem of the tapestry: the colours and patterns are discernable, but the loss of focus only forces the eye back to the picture or outside the frame, leaving us with the work of attention.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Jérôme Melançon : Peur pièta, by Nicholas Dawson

Peur pièta, Nicholas Dawson
Le Noroît, 2024

 

 

 

 

Perhaps I ought not to begin this review by mentioning that Nicholas Dawson’s sister, Caroline Dawson, passed away just over a month ago. I ought not to even mention it, because it might seem unrelated and odd; because that’s how I, very specifically, approached this collection, in a manner that those who will read this, and perhaps then pick up this book because of it, will not. Knowing the strength of the work of these siblings, I can only regret having so unfortunately lagged and waited so long that I only very recently read this book, and then more, and all in the light of this loss. Both are poets and researchers and incredibly gifted writers, both are incredible humans – or so I was told by those, some of them close to me, who are mourning Caroline and know Nicholas. Yet this is how I approached this collection, and so perhaps for someone who sits outside the conversations that take place around poetry and literature in Québec, perhaps there’s a possibility of reading these poems without their foreclosure, without the intrusion of reality into poetry. Yet at least for a time, many readers will be in a paradoxical reading situation in which the poems remain open in a manner that Caroline’s foretold death makes impossible: playing with the passage of time, they resist what time adds to them.

Regardless of how I might write about it, this is how I approached this book, picking it up a few weeks after reading the news after letting it sit on a shelf for a few weeks, and there is likely no way for me to write about it without beginning with this awareness of a loss I am seeing others feel. No matter what words I am to write about this book, they will come out of the awareness of distant relationships. I bring awareness, and not knowledge, being caught up in other people’s relationships, adding to the dense and carefully looked after relationships that run through the poems.

Ultimately I can begin by mentioning Nicholas Dawson’s (the Dawson to whom I’ll refer here) sister, since there is a sister in this collection, a sister who has her own section, “Hermana,” alongside “Madre” and “Abuela.” Dawson himself comes into our hands in a minor mode, as a child brought into the world the others had prepared for him while working out their own difficulties moving through that world. That is, he appears as a grandson, as a son, and as a “little brother,” notably in the poem that is reprinted on the back cover. In that poem, his minority appears alongside the main themes of the collection: cartography, prayer, transformation, calling out, memory, body and planet, childhood – all shiny and treasurable. One can hold any of these poems like a child holds a nice rock, like an adult holds a small seashell, their gleaming allowing us to appreciate their dulled or abrasive facets.

This collection, Peur pièta, follows Dawson’s Désormais, ma demeure, which was recently translated as House Within a House by D.M. Bradford. As Bradford mentions, translating Dawson involves going deeper into a relationship with the author which he facilitates by his care for his readers. And Peur pièta takes up some aspects of that previous book, including family relationships and depression. The dull or abrasive aspects of existence are fully rendered here as well. In many poems through the section titled “The Cruel Disturbance of the Cosmos,” an obsession with counting up or down often surfaces, proper as much to childhood as to those who seek to educate, or to those who attempt to breathe themselves out of rage and anxiety. Here a desperation for luck joins a habit of knocking on surfaces, including on wood, to ward off fright:

One two three times on wood – make it so that the word be not prophecy of the poets of yesteryear, damned and sent away, wandering alone and punished in lands, fissured scattered with forests teeming with creatures and demons with piercing eyes, ready to snatch lyres and verses so that today everything may die. One two three on my skull because there is no more wood, there is only terrified speech, and I fear that my head may not suffice.

(Un deux trois sur le bois – faites que le mot ne soit pas prophétie des poètes d’antan, maudits et congédiés, errant seuls et punis dans des terres fissurées, parsemées de forêts qui grouillent de créatures et de démons aux yeux perçants, prêts à subtiliser les lyres et les vers pour qu’aujourd’hui tout meure. Un deux trois sur mon crâne parce qu’il n’y a plus de bois, il n’y a qu’une parole terrifiée, et je crains que ma tête ne suffise pas, 83)

Yet within the collection poems balance each other out, and writing plays a role not only in warding off, but also in bringing together. Dawson’s relationship to his sister is one of unequivocal love and happiness, even as it is surrounded by the difficulties their mother, and her mother, experienced:

we had a mysterious speech
a communion woven with spells
guardian fortress of pillows and cushions

nous avions une parole mystérieuse
une communion tissée de formules magiques
forteresse tutélaire d’oreillers et de coussins (65)

Even as the perspective shifts, even as tonality and mode change, the voice remains the same. In free verse without capitalization or punctuation that makes subtle use of short lines and cuts, of all the silence and dream that white space on the page provides, poems without a centre; or in prose poems that keep thoughts together tightly and ties them together through an imposing and precise use of punctuation, poems without edges. Here we find one of the sharpest poems of the collection, where line breaks open universes:

the stars and lime teach us
times in circles

whose cycles tie together
at questions
addressed from the shore

now
that the vastness is of fire

(les étoiles et le limon nous apprennent / des temps circulaires // dont les cycles se lient / par des questions / adressées au large // maintenant / que le large est de feu, 97)

And the voice also remains the same even as its language shifts. Dawson’s Spanish is the tongue of his grandmother and mother, a tongue share with his sister, the tongue in which he maintains their presence through speaking of them and to them in French. Distance, death, loss cannot erase the traces that language and people leave within us. Spanish does not fight French; Dawson writes bilingually, incorporating each language into the other, avoiding the temptation to turn toward language and away from people – or toward readers and away from language. The two languages do not coexist, then, so much as form a whole; forming neither a chain nor a braid, Dawson allows them disappear into each other, into his tongue, into speech. No glossary, no explanation, no mention even of any hybridity: there is only a person’s unbounded manner of speaking:

“she bends down, y ruega, y ruega, día y noche ruega como yo so that her Virgin may hear her, so that the debt, whatever it may be, never swarm into anyone’s body” (elle se penche, y ruega, y ruega, día y noche ruega como yo pour que sa Vierge l’entende, pour que la dette, quelle qu’elle soit, ne s’essaime jamais dans le corps de quiconque, 47)

“With all these adjurations, todo tiembla, todo se mezcla, even the birds crash into my window and disappear” (À force d’adjurations, todo tiembla, todo se mezcla, même les oiseaux s’écrasent contre ma fenêtre et disparaissent, 81)

In their failures, languages give way to tongues and speech:

“when it failed we tripped / on a linguistic hiccup // then we turned our tongues in our mouths / to unbind new words” (quand ça échouait nous trébuchions / sur un hoquet linguistique // nous tournions alors nos langues dans nos bouches / pour délier des mots nouveaux, 64).

In this intense, precise work, Dawson displays his ability to bring together a world – whether it’s by placing together quotations by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Louise Dupré, and Björk; or by carving out space on the top of the page for cloud-like formations over space for us to hear our own breath, for us to find flight (rather than escape); or by moving through linguistic boundaries, breaking up other, more arbitary boundaries that separate and isolate – surmounting those separations against which we are not helpless.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water, was published by above/ground press in August 2023. 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 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, with handles resembling @lethejerome.

Jérôme Melançon : Ne retiens pas le feu, by Jacques Audet

Ne retiens pas le feu, Jacques Audet
Le Noroît, 2022

 

 

 

In his second collection, Ne retiens pas le feu (Do Not Hold Back the Fire), Jacques Audet carves short, precise, impossible images in sharp lines, stanzas, and poems. Perhaps his goal is to let multiplicity be multiple. Although each page begins with the only punctuation we find – a capital letter – which indicates a new poem, these pages bear no titles. Perhaps there are only a few longer poems under the six subtitles we find in the book, or perhaps these are sections that gather single page poems. Audet leaves room for indeterminacy at every level. The section (or poem) titled Devenir nuit carries both possible meanings: "To Become Night", and "To Become Is Harmful." It contains an advance toward darkness, the disappearance of light, a widening void, as announced by the penultimate page (67):

Barely settled / À peine établie
obscurity disperses the signs / l’obscurité disperse les signes
that had preceded it / qui l’ont précédée

a retreat in a single file / se retranchent à la file
of the words that kept / les mots qui tenaient
the present warm / le présent au chaud

you move along these sources / tu longes ces sources
where tongues rumble / où grondent des langues

again that rising up / encore que se soulèvent
darkness / les ténèbres
against all splendour / contre toute splendeur

It is the collection as a whole, and not just these few pages, that rises toward darkness and build toward annihilation and, in the next (and last) section, a great fire.

At a more local, molecular level, Audet uses the line break in short two- or three-line stanzas to destabilize our sense of vision. What begins as a relatively traditional line regarding nature is flipped into images that are impossible to picture, let alone see (and flipped literally, through the strong grammatical inversion of literary French):

the veins hide / behind the mirrors (les veines se cachent / derrière les miroirs, 13)

you trip on a cobblestone / and the image flees on horseback (tu trébuches sur un pavé / et l’image fuit à cheval, 23)

the shapes clovers or ribbons / no longer account for their shadow (les formes trèfles ou rubans / ne répondent plus de leur ombre, 32)

here leans the ladder / bareheaded your reason staggers (ici s’appuie l’échelle / tête nue chancelle ta raison, 52)

Audet inscribes himself in a poetic tradition that is neither surrealist nor symbolist. His careful yet cryptic approach to writing and his turning of silence into language is announced by the opening quotation by Paul Celan. Noise and speech abound, but the poems do not hold on to meaning:

your voice fills up / with what the ear trims away (ta voix s’emplit / de ce que l’oreille rogne, 16)

verbs where is perched / for a moment / the clatter of living (verbes où se perche / un moment / le fracas de vivre, 52)

the echo separates from itself / as from a dead language (l'écho se sépare de lui-même / comme d'une langue morte, 63)

A meditation on time winds its way through the poem: time contracts, expands; tenses shift, the future carries itself into the past; time slips a ring to the reader's finger; the sky gives way to night, the day shapes something that also exists as chopped into hours; and finally the time comes. This meditation runs alongside cuts, the snipping of scissors, all kinds of lacerations. Through these recurring operations, Audet manages to still any possible development and give time as juxtaposition or overlap rather than succession, exploring and describing rather than narrating, leaving his readers free to draw their own maps – or remain in a state of silence and stillness as before a flame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water, is forthcoming 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 Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.