courbure de la terre par jonas fortier

  My reviews of French poetry books are always the most niche, but at least once a year I try to expand my horizons and practice my second language…so here we go with courbure de la terre par jonas fortier.

courbure de la terre essentially translates to “curvature of the earth.” The title feels appropriate not only because so many of the poems feature round elements, curves along the horizon, but because there’s something about the tone of the poems that also feels soft. fortier is not a writer of hard edges but of gentle invitations. The poet takes on a mode that feels like some early French symbolists, drawing inspiration from things like the moon or rain drops and finding the deeper significance that is sometimes unspeakable.

There’s a layer of irony to me making that statement, though. There’s a sequence of poems in which fortier reflects on writing directly and provides a list of the types of poet he is not, outlining both motivations and processes for writing. He’s not a poet that works in a factory in unimaginable conditions; he’s not the poet that stays up all night and kills himself at twenty three. These tropes of the depressive and the isolated don’t reflect him, so while there are some symbols that are resonant with classic poetry, he still distances himself from their tradition.

I appreciate the art of quiet poems. fortier has a real observational quality in his work, rendering clouds and rain drops into art. The poem sequences are often untitled, and it blurs the line between individual poems and sequences of connected pieces, but the section <<Le sommeil est le neveu de la mort>> contains a piece that feels representative of the precise quality of fortier’s style. The piece reads, in part, as follows:

cette peine-là
est de saison, brume
démanchée contre le ciel
il se met à pleuvoir de minuscules araignées
des étoiles comme nous mais mieux
des gouttelettes encore poudreuses
comme des briques muettes
des flèches d’averse
viennent crever dans nos bras faibles
et nous portons à nos lèvres
des souvenirs d’herbes (54)

The description has that touch of tenderness and devastation that characterizes what I often think about in terms of a “poetic mode.” I particularly appreciate the rain being described like tiny spiders, rendering the droplets somewhat creepy, but also as stars “like us but better.” The line breaks sometimes make the lines read ambiguously, but the poem goes on to describe the droplets like falling arrows or bricks and there’s a heaviness there that counterbalances the softness of the powdery rain drops.

The section <<Vérités permanentes>> has some of my favourite pieces, which extend fortier’s motifs about the sky and clouds. In one piece, the speaker identifies himself and another (<<nous>>) as parallel to clouds, carrying the names of their fathers and the clothes of their mothers and big beards that have grown over time and having bodies like grapes where you can’t see inside. The poem’s volta explores a new angle and fortier explores the future, made of houses with hard planks that speak as you step on them. He talks about the opening of the house, the opening of the future, letting the wind speak through open doors and windows. The poem ends on the idea of the moon guiding people to the house alongside thin, key-like trees. It reads better in French: <<d’arbres minces / comme des clés>> (62). The extended metaphor works beautifully and mimics fortier’s approach: you are being trained as a reader how to listen to space, how to hear messages from your environment. It’s hard to translate here but there’s also an aural quality to the work, where particular sounds echo with a slight difference: dures / dureté, de soi / ce soir, and so on. These give the poem a coherence that feels like it touches on something other-worldly. 

The collection also reflects a fair deal on language itself. The section <<Vérités permanentes>> opens with a reflection on grammar:

il y a un temps
grammatical
qu’on appelle
vérité permanente

je n’en avais jamais entendu parler
jusqu’à ce qu’un Bescherelle
me révèle son nom

c’est arrivé par surprise
comme la lettre d’un ami cher
après des années passées
dans la contemplation
d’un pays lointain

j’ai eu une émotion très positive
bien que si proche de la tristesse
en apprenant que la vérité
peut être temps présent (59)

There’s a nostalgia to the piece that resonated with me, namely the idea of learning grammar from a Bescherelle (French Immersion kids represent!). I like, too, the sense of revelation that studying grammar brings and the reality that opens up. I also appreciate the tenuousness of the border between positive emotions and sadness and the way those converge at moments of clarity.

I can’t pretend that I understood the nuances of each of the poems in this collection. I do feel that the tone read as tender and a little tragic, but reflective and appreciative of the world. I flagged one of the early poems in the collection because I felt I didn’t have the vocabulary to really delve in. As I translated it a little more, the imagery stood out more dramatically: it was about kids “chained to strollers” watching birds and knowing that life is invented by the spirits of our dead, who have become <<essaims d’abeilles>> (24)—that is, swarms of bees. The poem took on a new philosophic intensity and then becomes a reflection on time reflected in the northern hemisphere collapsing like wet butter on the sidewalk. 

Another piece I revisited reinforced the idea of the poet as a wanderer. I’m tempted to put him alongside Baudelaire as a flanneur, but I’ll resist easy categorization. Essentially, there’s a poem about wandering but then clinging to certain phenomena, including the increasingly strange—like urine accumulating in ant nests (37). There’s an endless searching and a turning up of the speaker’s eyes to the stars…but we’d call them eggs (37). It’s an odd line to end on, a bit of cheekiness that I feel undermines the self-seriousness of the wandering poet’s approach.

Returning to the section <<Le sommeil est le neveu de la mort>>, there’s a piece that ties these elements together. There’s a roundness to the piece, the observational quality, and the sense of wandering and searching that fortier highlights. The poem has a simplicity to it: it lists different types of droplets—respiration, cuts and injuries, brilliant drops (52). The poet rolls like a dice all while marching on, ready to scale mountains and appreciating the thyme growing at the side of the sidewalk.

I admit I’m not the perfect audience for this book; I appreciate the language, but am not apt enough to appreciate its nuances and possibilities. The poems felt tender and beautiful and quiet, with flashes of the philosophical, which I tend to enjoy. It’s a nice collection and if you’re a reader of French, I’d love to hear you extend the conversation.

Happy reading!