I realize that reviewing a French poetry book will not likely yield my blog immediate breakout popularity, but it’s worth talking about Yannick Renaud’s Présent. Based on the epigraphs Renaud curates to begin the collection, I went in expecting a series of meditations on time, but the book takes some unexpected turns that, if dark, are rewarding and command attention to Renaud’s project.
Here’s how I read it.
The opening epigraphs establish a series of theses. Renaud includes an excerpt from Cthulhu, la joie by Jean-PIerre Guay that reads, “Nous somme faits pour la joie et le bonheur qui sont en nous. Le reste est ténèbres, le reste est illusion.” To paraphrase the French, it’s essentially a call to prioritize joy and happiness in our lives as our core reality. Renaud also includes an extended passage from Philip Roth’s The Humbling in translation that essentially suggests to care about the instant. The moment, the moment, the moment. Nothing before, nothing after. If you could exist for a single moment, then you can go wherever you’d like. Roth acknowledges that it’s the simplest thing in the world and yet also the most difficult.
Two of the three core epigraphs place emphasis on the primacy of the moment, yet Renaud offers some strategic challenges that undercut the potentially hedonistic YOLO mentality that open the collection. I would be remiss not to mention that one of the epigraphs hints at this tension. From Jean-Luc Nancy’s <<Ici même à présent>>, Renaud cites, “Nous ne savons plus nous raconter à nous-mêmes. Nous n’avons plus de temps représentable – ni passé, ni avenir, ni présent.” My translation skills are poor, but essentially Nancy says that we no longer know how to recognize (or meet) ourselves; we are not able to represent times—not past, not future, not present. This incommunicability—or irreconcilability—of time and selfhood offers a challenge to the primacy of the present, which is continued in yet another epigraph for the first section of Renaud’s book: “le désert n’est jamais celui qu’on boit quand le présent se souvient du futur” (from Chien d’azur by José Acquelin). [My translation: the desert is never the one we drink when the present remembers the future]. There’s a sense of failed expectation, a disconnect between the present and the future.
Moreover, the reference to a desert seems pointed, which leads to one of the core reasons I find Renaud’s project interesting. Often, writers explore the human dimensions and experiences of time. Consider how many poems, for instance, have dealt with the fear wasted time or calls to seize the day. Here, though, Renaud reframes these discussions to a more environmental framework. The reference to the desert in the epigraph, then, I think fits with the broader ecocritical framework of the text and challenges the presentism that feeds destructive impulses in favour of a stance towards longevity.
This surprising turn of the temporal into an environmental direction emerges in apocalyptic language. There is a distinctly critical tone towards a collective “on” (we / us). Renaud offers a litany of our failings while (re?)empowering nature to destroy us. In one poem, Renaud writes, “On prend on craint on détruit, déluge dissout croissante la honte, racines foudroient les crânes cassants” (21). Essentially, we pillage and destroy and yet ultimately roots crush brittle skulls. The implication to me is that our failings are more embarrassing than truly disruptive. In another section, Renaud refers to “Colère gêne” (27), embarrassing anger and then refers to aspiring holy warriors (“les aspirants aux guerres saintes” 27) before suggesting land destruction: “on massacre le territoire” (27). The poem then references visions of brutality, explosions, pulverized bones and that we have died after exorcising “la splendeur ordinaire” [ordinary splendor] (27).
These visions of disaster and environmental destruction continue throughout the collection, sometimes more explicitly than others. Here’s a full-page example:
“Retour saison des destructions, des trompe-la-mort, gorges à peine couvertes, à peine artifice, visage peint, visage sain, géants de verre défilent avant que sans tain se voile l’averse.
On imprime l’insane, la logorrhée, le trop-plein, on persiste au-delà de sa verve, on vomit dans le dimanche des crucifiés.
On chérit la marche, contraint à baisser les yeux le ciel.” (41)
Renaud notes that the season of destruction has returned, which involves (among other things) cheating death and, my favourite line, “géants de verre” (glass giants) on parade. My understanding of Renaud’s thesis is that our focus on the present facilitates a number of destructive and thoughtless habits that allow us to “persiste au-delà de sa verve” (41)---we exist too long.
The last line of the poem is a beautifully and philosophically put: “We cherish walking, forced to look down at the sky” (41). These strange inversions drive the collection as a whole.
The apocalyptic intersects with the introspective for a particularly existential effect. I’ll offer one more full page as an example:
“Ici l’entrain repose dénué des vagues euphories, on brime l’enfermement, dévore amnistie, carnage, présomption des vils, des hauts, des grats, on attise la nuisance, on prise l’effacement.
Ennui pour dompter le sable, la jeunesse, son desaveu, on rompt les cercles, l’élégance on travestit.” (37).
I thought Renaud’s work offered really striking imagery, rich metaphor, and snappy philosophical one liners. The first line in the poem is immediately engaging: “On imagine les portes là où pleuvent des briques” (15). We imagine doors where bricks are raining. The disconnect between doors and bricks is engaging, but also in terms of weight: the lightness or gentleness of rain combined with bricks offers an unsettling sense of impossibility. From there, the collection moves into a discussion of windows snapping shut (almost like guillotines) as “l’eau jamais ne rejoigne / la soif” (16) [essentially: water never relieves the thirst]. In the following stanza, Renaud refers to “un étang de cendre” (16), a pond of ashes that then grows larger and larger every hour. In some ways, it recalls the imagery of Ingeborg Bachmann—which is probably the most obscure reference I could make here, but you’re already reading a review about a Quebecois poet on an English blog, so…
Before moving on, I’d like to reference a few of my other favourite lines from the collection. There are lines that resonate deeply, if abstractly. For instance, “la roue s’est inventée en roulant” (19): the wheel was invented in its rolling; there’s a temporal reference here of course in terms of the wheel of time, but also that moment-to-moment existence leads to forming the final product. In another poem, Renaud says that “on récolte poussière” (29), which means collect dust, but in “récolte” I read it more like “harvest” or “cultivate” and the more active engagement in the process seems more poignant to me. The idea of slowness that goes along with cultivating dust fits in with the temporal dimension of the work. Elsewhere, Renaud compares dawn and mischief and suggests that “qu’ombre indique piste du jour” (25), i.e. that the shadow marks the path for the day (the future encroaching back on us, perhaps?). The relationship between timeframes is critical to Renaud’s project.
In terms of style, the collection is essentially one of prose poems. That said, I read the collection aloud in its French and, for all its darkness, it has some lovely aural qualities. There are repetitive sounds that have an entrancing effect, often with internal rhymes cycling through poems. A representative example is when Renaud draws on arboreal imagery and hence language. The arb-ab-abr sounds get mixed around, evoking the French arbre [tree], even when not explicitly used. For instance, he writes, “Maladies sélènes on arbore, densité calme, sifflotement, aux abrutis on cède le sort, des oiseaux les feux jaillissent du brasier” (24). Setting aside for a moment the beautiful idea of moon sickness and the apocalyptic fires reflected here, we have “arbore” and “abrutis.” While neither is a specific reference to les arbres, combined with the other imagery of the passage, evoke a tree-like spectre. Later, Renaud references “les forts on abhorre” (34). I can’t help but notice this particular trend, but there are numerous examples of lines that read smoothly.
I’ll creep towards an ending for this review by referencing one of my favourite parts of the collection, wherein Renaud writes the following:
“Trouées dans l’heure on ne distingue plus, doigts entre les limbes, aubier fugace, de la pleine pointent percées d’étoiles qu’on aurait autrement crues mornes, soupçons cessent, accomplissent l’éveil des garçons et des filles, la nature a de ces manières.” (20)
I find this passage so rich in its sensual details. For example, the reference to the sapwood offers a poignant image. What is time if not slow and sticky sap? The philosophic bent to the poem is also engaging to me: the idea of embodying time, of it being indistinguishable and yet able to be pierced, is the kind of line that feels true, even if it’s a bit cerebral. There’s the touch of uneasy optimism in stars we “otherwise” would have considered gloomy and a decrease in suspicion. Yet, the fact that the poem closes with “la nature a de ces manières” (nature has its ways) offers a strangely ominous quality, considering the thunderous roots destroying skulls from earlier.
This may be the most challenging French poetry collection I’ve read in recent years. It’s challenging linguistically and conceptually, but feels rich in its meditative and apocalyptic motifs. One can never be certain that they’ve understood poetry thoroughly, especially when one reads poetry in a second language. I’m sure there are nuances I’ve missed and unintended meanings I’ve projected, so apologies to Renaud and any francophones reading this review. I’m not even sure, for example, that I’ve correctly understood the thesis of the book—but if so, I think the misunderstanding is a productive one.
Thank you for using this moment (or rather quick succession of present moments) to go on this journey with me. I hope it’s been enriching.
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