Translated by Robert Mazjels, Erin Moure
Coach House Books, 2007
Read by Hermonie Xie
The romantic title lured me into picking this one up. It suggests the mingling of man and nature – and a notebook, a battered bundle of paper; provenance and tome of ideas that flit in and out of the mind like ecstatic hummingbirds. Before reading, I believed it to be a scrapbook of some sort, filled to the rim with thoughts dictated, both long and short, simple and complex. A mosaic, perhaps.
The book does somewhat resemble a scrapbook. Countless stanzas are sprinkled generously across 81 pages of text; among them each individual one may effectively stand as its own poem of vivid, short, almost cryptical nature. But I suspect this book of housing only one poetic composition, one whose presence lingers and treads upon all sides of the bound volume. While reading, words rush forward in a hasty flood of letters, arresting my attention and loosening its grip only after the last page has been turned. The unusual structure of Brossard’s poetry is comparable to the curious paintings of Picasso. In style the works of both artists have a liberating quality that proves them unbound by conservative expectations of their genre.
Brossard is a photographer, capturing with ink and words what others would with light and pigment. Snapshots of conventional day to day objects are presented to readers in macro mode. Each curve, line, and texture is pleasantly drawn out by words selected with care. Brossard’s wispy words bind our world to the world of language and the alphabet. Parallels are made between the rolling of waves and pages turned (as if the sea//were about to surge up at your back//in pages of foam and foment), then there are “the words cerise, olive, words we stick in our mouths”; words are fruits or berries, hurriedly scrambled between keenly chomping teeth.
Through Brossard’s diction, so “shredded” at times it seems as if she were narrating her work in an alien language, one may decide for themselves what aspects to sample on this multifaceted dish of poetic cordon bleu. As for myself, I prefer to nibble my way into the pages – one line at a time.
