negotiation
by Douglas
Messerli
Nicole Brossard
Shadow Soft et Soif, translated
from the French by Guy Bennett (Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 2003)
The coincidence
of Nicole Brossard’s short book of poetry Shadow Soft et Soif being
published at the same time as the Canadian poet and fiction writer’s three
fictions, The Blue Book (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2003), gives joy to
those, like me, who think Brossard is one of the most outstanding of North
American writers.
Like many
of her other works, the book is written in a voice that is at once highly
lyrical and extremely private. The reader often has the feeling in Brossard’s
work that he or she is a sort of voyeur, listening in to an immediate series of
events and thoughts expressed by the poet to a loved one. But then, perhaps the
reader can also feel herself or himself as the lover, and that creates a kind
of sensual thrill in reading her work.
As in her other books, also, there is a
feeling of “negotiation,” of the poet straddling worlds. As a French-speaking
Canadian, her work in translation often contains both English and French lines.
As the title indicates, the shadow about which Brossard is writing is both soft
and “thirsty,” something both gentle (as if she had reversed Dylan Thomas’s
plea to “not go gentle into that good night.”) yet slightly rapacious. As a
poet and fiction writer, Brossard often crosses genres, and in this book she reminds
the reader several times that, while it is a work of poetry, it is also a
narrative:
for now
we’re
still narrating
night
falls slowly
In order to create the “shadow” one must
have the sun and such oppositions as the morning and evening, the fresh
beginning of life and potential of death. Love is often proffered and just as
quickly pulled away. Order and precision alternate with “avalanches of
shattered glass.” Indeed, Brossard’s world is pulled between “pleasure” and
“gestures / bites, bedrooms with their shadowy, supple, hollow spaces, knotted
brows.”
By the time the narrative is complete and,
at the end of the series of short poetic sequences, “night falls,” the poet is
left with no answers, only “questions,” lingering “bubbles of silence.” But the
language she has used to get there has expanded her comprehension of life. And
one perceives that even while the human experience has been utterly fragmented
(“nights displace knees,” and “heads or tails” are “scattered”), at dawn
once more life is put into motion, “the verb to be courses / in the veins, a
heavenly body, it flies / after love or a grain of salt.” The cycle, the
negotiation between self and lover, between reader and poet, will begin anew.
Los Angeles, 2003
Reprinted from Green
Integer Blog (December 2008).
