ellipse

ellipse

For 30 years, ellipse has been showcasing one Anglophone and one Francophone poet in both languages. Some of ellipse’s past tag-teams include Nicole Brossard with Erin Mouré, Anne Hébert with Gwendolyn MacEwen and Michèle Lalonde with Margaret Atwood. A glimpse at the back-issues shows that just about every major Canadian poet has had half an issue devoted to his or her work. The latest instalment of ellipse features the poetry of Suzanne Jacob and Stephanie Bolster. An essay on one of the poets forms a short introduction to the writers and their work. I was a little miffed when I discovered that only one of the introductory essays appears in English (Jacob’s) and one in French (Bolster’s). I guess there is no shortage of writings on Bolster and Jacob in their native tongues, so the people at ellipse probably did not feel the need for duplication. André Brochu’s essay (translated by D.G. Jones) does a fairly good job of analyzing Jacob’s “Le part de feu.” Unfortunately, the essay is not well chosen since only a fragment of “Le part de feu” appears in the journal, while other poems appear without benefit of any critical attention. Nonetheless, Jacob’s work is excellent. Her words are stripped down and raw, yet the poems themselves feel epic in scope. There is a sense of quest and struggle that runs through the collection, but any victories or moments of triumph are tempered by uncertainty. Not to be intimidated, I read the French translation (by Charly Bouchara) of Christine Wiesenthal’s essay on Bolster armed with my failing high-school French and a French-English dictionary. Honestly, it wasn’t that painful, and the essay provided a good concise look at some of Bolster’s works. Her writing is more lyrical than that of Jacob. Also, Bolster often adopts a conversational tone in her poems as she conducts many-sided meditations on Alice “in Wonderland” Liddell and the québécois painter Jean-Paul Lemieux. Both selections of poetry are great introductions to the featured poets; part ellipse’s specialty for the past three decades, and hopefully a little longer still. (Matthew Pioro)

lit journal, #61, 114 pgs, $8, Charly Bouchara and Monique Grandmangin, Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, C.P. 10 Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC, J1K 2R1

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