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.
