In the Flesh of the Text: The Poetry of Marie-Claire Bancquart. (Collection Monographique en Litterature Francaise Contemporaine)

IN THE FLESH OF THE TEXT

THE POETRY OF MARIE-CLAIRE BANCQUART

Collection Monographique Rodopi en Littérature Française Contemporaine sous la direction de Michaël Bishop

XLVII

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

IN THE FLESH OF THE TEXT

THE POETRY OF MARIE-CLAIRE BANCQUART

Peter Broome

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2366-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in The Netherlands

Preface by the Director of the Collection

The Collection Monographique Rodopi en Littérature Française Contemporaine seeks to offer a series of concise and yet at once elegant and fundamental critical studies devoted to those French and francophone writers of today whose work reveals rich imaginativeness and deep truth. Most studies, usually choosing to embrace the full extent of the work at hand, will be oriented towards authors whose writing would seem immediately to demand that analytic and synthesising gesture which, I hope, the Collection will accomplish. From Projets alternés, Mémoire d’abolie and Opportunité des oiseaux, to Sans lieu sinon l’attente, Énigmatiques, La vie, lieu dit and beyond, the poetical work of Marie-Claire Bancquart has woven rare and subtle intricacies that have established her amongst the most finely meditative and delicately articulate poets of the last fifty years. Questions of identity, presence and exile proliferate in a climate at once of anxiety and a desire for absolute meaning in the context of ephemeralness and a ‘lingering on (of) the fugitive fragments of a ‘divinity’’. Her work, formed by (post)modernity’s doubts and relativities yet steeped in a mythicalness and a sense of profound ontic improbability, opts for an immersion in earth’s enigmas and quotidian wonders, seeks some precarious ‘sensual redemption’ as it equally affirms a tenderness at once quasi-mystical and, conscious of its passage through language, sensitive to the ‘provisionality of the [latter’s] invention and resourcefulness’. To be ‘avec la mort, quartier d’orange entre les dents’, as Marie-Claire Bancquart’s latest book is titled, is to refuse nothingness and ever to embrace the mystery of an incarnation yet so easily troubling. Peter Broome’s study, ever intense, alert to microcosmic detail as to sweeping macrocosmic factors, offers an elegant, powerfully insightful and intimate appraisal of one of France’s finest writers of our time. Michael Bishop Halifax, Nova Scotia June, 2007

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Éditions José Corti for permission to reprint Suite au dieu-lune from Opéra des limites; to François Boddaert for permission to reprint Cariatides, Carnet, Habitée par une tendresse and À la morte from collections all published by Obsidiane; and most especially to Marie-Claire Bancquart herself for the inspiration of her work and the generosity of her presence throughout the composition of this study.

‘And I shall take you to the south of my mind’ For Di

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

11

MÉMOIRE D’ABOLIE Définition

23 25

OPPORTUNITÉ DES OISEAUX Trains

57 59

OPÉRA DES LIMITES Suite au dieu-lune

87 89

SANS LIEU SINON L’ATTENTE Cariatides

139 141

ÉNIGMATIQUES Carnet

159 161

LA VIE, LIEU-DIT Habitée par une tendresse

185 187

LA PAIX SAIGNÉE À la morte

229 231

BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHY

263

INDEX OF PROPER NAMES

269

* Throughout the study, the above titles of collections have been abbreviated, in all references, to the following: MA, OO, OL, SL, E, VLD and PS. Other abbreviations used, AM and RE, refer to Avec la mort, quartier d’orange entre les dents and Rituel d’emportement.

INTRODUCTION

Why Marie-Claire Bancquart? Because no French poet of the contemporary moment has taken poetry more earnestly, as a live instrument, into the resistances of the human interior. The dark space beneath the skin, over-familiar yet foreign, which invites the adventure of words to bury itself and reemerge in patterns of uneasy self-awareness. Where the bones are conduits, the veins travel-lines, and the joints the sensitive nodes of a tangle of contradictions. She is an instrumental writer, playing the geography of the self, outlining its contours with restless notes, feeling out its high and low ground, the open perspectives and tight passages, arid tracts and fertilities. Her creation is a shifting territory: spaces swelling and contracting, overlapping, subject to unstable boundaries and a turbulent dynamics. It is a domain where surfaces and partitions give way and new thresholds loom. One finds oneself reversed. One broaches other selves within the self, discovering the unfathomable variety and richness of the human lining. One discovers also one’s vulnerability and frailty. In the selfauscultation which goes with physical malaise and illness, bones can seem friable, jangling with unanswered signals. The hum of blood may ferry an unbearable lightness of being. One senses the abyss in the hiatus between one pulse and the next. The sprawl of the inner void seems always too unmanageable for the temporary fillings it invokes. Investigation turns all too instantly into a burial-ground of vestiges. Within that frailty is a wandering word: insomniac spirit in the veins. It is as if, in the cellular sponginess and as one probes the joints of pain and unrest, a thin searchlight were detecting clearances in the human definition. It may be an animal calling shifting in its age-old lair. Or an overwhelming surge of maternity deep inside. Or proliferating spaces for the overspill of desire. Or glimmers of light at the end of a tunnel, enough to make one think that one is not so much a crypt as a chapel where a ‘sacredness’ survives, obscurely rearranging fragments of a deconstructed spirituality. It is a territory of transfusions, acting as a proof that man is the life-form with the

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In the flesh of the text

most inner porticos and passageways, an unfinished complexity of openings. Such transfusions are a dark ‘reference elsewhere’, a shuttle between approximations of voice and what has no voice. They come intermittently to remind one that in the visceral density there are countless ‘beyonds’. Marie-Claire Bancquart has evoked in innumerable variations the metamorphic possibilities and multiplicity of the ‘self’. Identity is not a determinable ‘sameness’ or oneness. It is a sea of movements folding and refolding, of unpredictable germinations and improvised reshapings. What one is the source of is almost impossible to know. One is self in draft form, too provisional and turbulent to proof-read. Her writing is an arena of doubles: a versatile dialogue with one’s faces of ‘someone else’. If the figure of Narcissus flits past in the turn of a page, it is less to fall in love with himself than to be problematized amidst wavering images. The mirrors are slanting and broken. Faces intermingle and overlap. Masks appear and disappear in the frame, override each other, challenging who one thinks one is. Reflections out of true hint at less patent truths somewhere beyond one’s probes of comprehension and barbs of vision. One converses in the meantime with glints, mirages, lateral drift and loosened liaisons. The pageant of self is not a harmonious one. It can be a parade of foreigners: vague cousins, potential selves, who, even in the mirror, do not see eye to eye and call aggressively or plaintively for workable translations. Enemies and friends, they suggest a parentage while radically requestioning our sphere of ownership and rootedness. They are our sleepwalkers: tangential doubles who reconnect when the purposeful self is dispossessed or put on hold. It is the irresolution of their dialogues which prevents Narcissus from finding concordance with the reality of a world beyond. No longer stable tenants of ourselves, we are the space for the manœuverings of our intimate usurpers (among whom the unquiet dead). Resemblances (renewed semblances) take one by stealth and disappear before they can be fully recognised. It is in this way, in being partly disowned, that the proliferation of personae tips into the conjecture of personne: exposing the gulf of non-person, which may appear as an annulment or, via a greater transparency of self, access to the approaches of a nameless ‘oneness’.

Introduction

13

Bancquart’s poetry gives a special place to the enigma and precarious identity of woman. Is it that she lives more dangerously at the border? Is she more sensitive to the suction of origins swelling and withdrawing? Is she more conscious of transitions of the body between immobility and the energy of seasonal cycles? Has she a stronger identification with the tearing of being? Is she more instinctively, empathetically drawn into the body of nature? As a vehicle of birth, does she have a greater gift for self-abandonment and sacrifice, for becoming a medium of creative formation and an agent of passage? Has she a more telling awareness of evolutions in the inner crypt, of what is internalized as growth rather than externalized, and of the spurting forces of the artesian self? Is her body more schooled in the alternations of fullness and emptiness, of the centre and the confines? Is she more likely to know the ache of the creative void and the switch to absence? Is she more intimately conversant with forms of marginalization that men know little of: that for instance of being beached at the side of one’s most powerful streams, a bubble of desire waiting to be reimmersed? Desire is an ‘in-between’: unexpended energy between launch and arrival, need and fulfilment. And to wait is to be camped in a halfand-half zone: expectancy looking for alternative signals of access. To glimpse the multiplicities of identity is to be tempted from the limits and arbitrariness of one’s ‘home ground’ in order to take the measure of a vast non-place where one is not occupant or solid state but a form of mobility elsewhere, a condition of passage. That the between is infinitely malleable is evident from the resurgent tensions and poetic oscillations of Bancquart’s writing: tiny vibrations, lurches, quivers, momentary spasms, fits and starts, registered in the force-field between inner and outer worlds, a body and its galaxy, exclusion and inclusion; between the centre and the periphery, excess and lack, illumination and eclipse, composure and decomposure, unification and sprawl; between souvenir and devenir, the pre-existent and the premature, hardened impossibilities and unverifiable foretastes of the true, accidents and some vague notion of necessity. One is an equinox, a prolonged season of ice and thaw. A semi-articulateness between the muteness of things and tortuous embryos of communication. A persistent alchemy exercised between shards of intensity and nothingness, between words possessed and that pre- and post-verbal evanescence which slips through them as if they

14

In the flesh of the text

were not there. A state of becoming dogged by what might be remnants of a memory of being. Poetry, for Bancquart, is a border activity, a calling of the margins, there to engage with fluencies between light and dark, the identifiable and the unidentifiable, death-in-life and life-in-death. It is also a confrontation with its own sensations of exile. Exile is to be peripheral rather than central. It is when one’s ‘location’ turns into a perturbing ‘placelessness’, and temporary havens splinter among other shores. It is the ‘winter of our discontent’, by which one is vacated, transformed into a hollow traversed by unattached visitors. It is a situation of foreignness even with regard to the products of one’s own inventiveness, which defy explanation, pattern and permanence: transitory coagulations of indeterminate size and significance. Exile is to unsettle in a land of erosions and in states of suspense. It submits to strange winds of space, and to a symptomatic infinity which pierces flimsy envelopes and pulls one teetering to the edge. If to be exiled is to be expelled from one knows not where and disinherited, it is a condition all the more acute in an age that has come to doubt its gods. Bancquart’s creativity bears the mark of faith in its orphaned state. Scriptures have fallen apart, the word has gone toppling through successive abysses. Religious skies, now smoky, carry not a presence but an ‘unrest’, a timeless anxiety. Lingering on are the fugitive fragments of a ‘divinity’, almost compelling enough to rekindle some sense of the sacré and a semblance of worship in the most unlikely places. It is as if one were tapping at the dark with a white stick. God, with his capital letter dissolved, becomes a god of multiple absences, a god of ‘minusness’: defined, or perpetually undefined, as the devoid-of-image, as the blanks of speechlessness. He is a manner of malaise that we go visiting, an unattainable roundness of which we shape tiny islands. Or a dust in the universe, homeless particles of which cause itches in the tantamount to nothingness. Exile is to find a habitable encampment among the gods’ leftovers. It is to compromise with the frustration of signs. Unattributable vibrations, fireflies in the sleep, transactions melting in the air, doors which half-open and snap shut, travelling mirages and eclipses are the filigree of this fragile paper. We are, it seems, proprietors of passage: holders of a pass from some unknown authority but lacking the code. And all that remains in the end to show that we have been there is a

Introduction

15

disorderly cluster of ciphers, a few signs of wear and tear at the threshold. To be reincarnated in a poem is to broach a new space and time. Bancquart’s poetry is an enigmatic expansion: a teasing-out of the retractive and the minimal along a resilient life-line stretching from the wordless to the word. It is given to ‘creating space’. Not a space with a clear and firm delineation, however, but one conceived only as exploratory transgression. A space, then, which could be anywhere, virtually a ‘non-place’: expansible and soluble, with no mapped itineraries, characterized by travel and border-crossings. Its named setting may be Paris, but Paris rather as it is for Baudelaire: a hub of turbulence, febrility and metamorphosis, where time in flux reconfigures its definitions, throws them into new equations and rearranges the signs. It is a space where the unexpected splits surfaces to reveal what no longer corresponds to a neatly plotted world, where the mind journeys involuntarily on tricks of vision, an accident of linkage, sensations which become a trapdoor, or a word turned into an etymological or a sonorous escalator. Desire, the energy of poetry, is not habitable but a succession of expropriations jump-started and given rein. Space, for Bancquart, is our darkness on the move, our unquenchable overflow, a series of rendezvous eaten into voids, a state of being before, caught in the dynamics of expectancy. It is a space decentred (in the margins of which is the unsolved space called ‘woman’). And if it is a space constantly redrawn, stretched and clenched in the concertina of distances, it is to make one all the more aware of the incongruity of our space within a vaster one. This is a poetry alive to the discrepancies of interrelated spaces. In elasticating those dubious tracts at the edge of desire, and in widening the gaps opened by the pressure of private dreams, it refines the realization that we live habitually in a mere shred of space: moveable outposts of some hypothetical centre. To push the periphery is to sense where chronology melts and other directives override the short-term. Bancquart’s work is a venture upstream. It takes in the reverberations of a history which belies the thinness of the present. It fosters the conjecture of a time without caesuras and of a verb to dissolve the divisions of tenses. Her texts are most often a form (insatiably metamorphic forms) of time-travel: reticent, sparsely equipped expeditions into the jostle of the millenia.

16

In the flesh of the text

Detecting snatches of agelessness, they trace paths which hint towards a reconciliation of times, even a possible retrieval from exile. If time, for Bancquart, is a renewable gift of the pristine, with its first whiplash of astonishment, and an unfurling of the naïvety beneath the civilized self, then it is no less a source of disturbance and disquiet. To travel its archeology is to navigate endless lock-gates and the turbid flood that presses against them. It is where upstream and downstream clash, where identity is renegotiated amidst floating pieces and renewable collages. Time is the crucible into which one is crumbled: a chronological clair-obscur where swirl both the determinants of self and the agents of its destruction. And if the self seeks to read its inscriptions in a comprehensible (and containing) text, then here it lurches in a bewildering etymology, an intermittent Morse code with continuities and hiatuses, sharp messages of recognition and patches of opaqueness. Memory is an untrustworthy scout. At times an uncannily directed probe, homing in on the half-obliterated locus of precious possessions, it is at others a tattered lifeline, an SOS, signals rendered inaudible by interference and a drift into non-significant blanks. It is, even so, our ‘dating agency’. It registers the violences of history still repercussing. It is the indication that we move on the turning page of the réversible. It enables boosts of vitality from what appeared to be lost. It gives access to the otherwise irretrievable dead. For these texts are reception-rooms for the dead: imperfectly lit and thinly furnished, but a refuge for an expressiveness seeking relief. They are animated (paradoxically) by the influence of the dead, as if we were their debtors and, obscurely, their envoys. We give them a different clay on which to grip. Time, throwing its reverse switch, rolls us round their axis: showing not only that we are freighted with the past and subject to fears and hopes which date back centuries, but that nothing is a total death, that we are worked by stubborn ancestors through whom, sustaining the dialogue, one can better read the runes of death-signs in oneself, fathom the script of one’s own carbondating and the mottled patterning of the mortal horoscope. It is a poetry which makes openings to the ‘other side’. It magnifies moments when one no longer believes death. It lives in a spirit of renewal which disproves decline: it draws strength from a parental photograph among the ruins.

Introduction

17

There can be few poets of the contemporary era who, interlacing the ancient and the decidedly modern (with its disorientated, broken forms) have delved so inventively into the repercussions of myth. If Bancquart is so receptive to the faces of prehistory and the riddle of origins, what could be more natural than to sound those inherited ‘figures’ which, through the civilizations, have served to elucidate the problematical definition of man, his urges and anxieties, dilemmas and aspirations, dissatisfactions and dreams. Myth itself has to be reborn, given renewed flesh, in a firmament of changing signs. For what is its legacy but the formative cry of expendable existences which have become their own eternal fable? Œdipus, Orestes and Electra, Ariadne, the Minotaur, Ixion, Orpheus and Eurydice, Daphne and Apollo, Mithra, Sappho, Saint Cecilia and Rome, Cain and Abel, Jonah, the doves of the Ark, Lazarus, the woman of Samaria, Moses, the Burning Bush, Lake Tiberius, the loaves and the fishes: all constitute the vocabulary, overlaid throughout the centuries, of our obscured palimpsest. They are a fund of semi-sacred significances waxing and waning like a dying planet. They are the tracings of untamed patterns still populating us. They are part of a complex genealogy, drawing memory beyond personal markers into the sign-language of a collective dictionary. They are, in a sense, our black hole: having almost lost their original human content, they suck us back in to sacrifice new perplexities of self to their avid, fading hieroglyphics. Marie-Claire Bancquart’s work is an unwinding of shrouds, a return to the tangle of roots and a reimmersion of oneself as a human mythology in progress. If ‘mythology’ suggests abstraction, the word ‘incarnation’ provides the counterweight. For her poetry is essentially a context for exchange: exchange in a vibrantly physical form. And if the dislodging of words takes place at the porous edge of self, as the transitive transaction between inner and outer, self and other, then the text is characteristically a materialization, a metamorphosis into a waiting sensuality. Few writings are more responsive to modes of reabsorption into the natural world. It is a question of admission into a genetic timelessness, of realising the mysterious germinations of which one is part, their surprising cohesions and collusions. It is not only, as one caresses the complementarities of recto and verso, a double sensual intertwine, but almost a rhythmic affinity, a shared

18

In the flesh of the text

respiration. One becomes, as it were, the draft of a project of translation, an incipient osmosis into the transitions of greenness and sap. It is one of the joys of Bancquart’s poetry to feel a flush of transfusion as some tidal imperative pulls from the edge: to know the discretion of speech of a garden, breach the succulent roundness of an apple, imagine the throb in a plump fig, bury one’s eye in fleecy heathland, sense the bronchial tissue swaying with river grass, hear the visual shriek of a hellebore, read the tremulous alphabet of a tree in the aspiration of one’s veins, pass through the eye of a flower, lose words in the quiver of a leaf, drift with sea-foam as if tasting milk for the first time. The text is potentially a theatre of sensual redemption. It is where one’s marginality and absence take on flesh, where one quaffs juices to brave the abyss, where the ballast of a plum held in the palm or a segment of orange squeezed between the teeth are a defiance of vertigo and nothingness. That spongy density is made ours, as perhaps the only inexhaustible antidote to defective gods, to broken identities, ambivalence and alienation, exile and placeness. Sparsely one shares another blood-stream, in a unity from which selfconsciousness, divisiveness and the echoes of Narcissus melt away as irrelevances. One is momentarily a perfect bridge, like Monet’s pont japonais, shot through with vegetation, light and water, where the holes themselves are a fluid floral alchemy. One traverses life lashed to a raft of ‘thicknesses’, which are our only sure and persistent possession. We appropriate them, as they appropriate us, where more nebulous ownerships fail. We are shifted into their strange surplus and dense alliances as if towards a lingering identity. Their invitations are legion: the tossed contortions of trees, the warmed quiver of an iris, a grape-pip under the tongue, an intense yellow on the eye, a sticky bud, the springiness of mossy turf, the bursting of a melon-flower, the flop of a falling chestnut, a bending cradle of ferns. They are the palpable articulations of our relationship with the world and its perennial creativity: junctures where our articulation (as speech) coheres, elaborates a common cause, and tests new facilities of movement. The desire of Bancquart’s poetry, and arguably of all ventures of poetic language, is to rehumanize the dessicated and congealed, to reopen springs. Many of her texts tussle painfully with a world of broken connections, cold exile, where sources have seized up or spurt

Introduction

19

only meagrely, under duress. A world of the skinned-over and the skin-deep, insensitive to the meaning of its own scar-tissues. A world of killing in diverse senses, with a hardened history of executioners. A world of stasis and glacial arrest, partitioned by frigid panes, turnedaway looks and sealed tombs. It is a poetry which extricates hidden life-lines, throws the warmth of a voice into the speechless ‘nobodyspaces’, blows gently on what may yet be embers, offers a stretched skin to the reverberations of a faint music rising from dissonance and cacophony, salvages the softness of round things from glazed surfaces and rectilinear prisons, feels stirrings in the grave, restores ardent memories from oblivion, reprogrammes the automaton in the self, relaunches chance and gusts of the impossible into taciturn dictatorships, renews our licence to be ‘inbetween’, transforms the private self into permeability and reaches through to the neediness of other beings still starved of the colour red or the promise of a petal floated against the mouth of space. The experience of words for Marie-Claire Bancquart is a dubious and incomplete one. They chase the bait of a communication often beyond reach, leaving in their wake snuffed signals, changed signs, scrambled messages and an awareness of what they have not touched. They are a threatened testimony. They form a language of preludes, always falling short of what continues beyond their fringe. They are words of such non-belonging in their ductile space that the author can hardly sign them in her own right. They make tracings of the unassimilables that sift through the mouth. They can express themselves as blockages, hiatuses, lacunae. They engineer their own abyss. Undermined as continuity of syntax, undone as self-contained globules of meaning, they tell more by their uneven, stuttering progress on the white of the page, by their thinning and fattening shapes, their rhythms of hiccough and song, about the play of energies and trajectories of desire which move them. They are equivocal words, springing surprises, opening trap-doors to their own contradiction. They unroll and retighten in uninterpretable alternations. They carry embryonic fragilities of significance. Syllables speak perhaps more forcibly than the wholeness of words, in a tentative braille somewhere between mist-wrapped murmurs and the shock of jagged cries. Words here are corrosive travellers through a next-to-nothingness. Their inscriptions are sketched, not on stone, but on an evolutionary space: formations crumbling into silence, hinged

20

In the flesh of the text

between centres and margins, inhabited by friable things, of which language itself is the most acute. What kind of definition of poetry does one glean from such provisional crystallizations? It is a definition as multiple as metamorphosis. It is an intense, unfinished document, a transient flare on the edge of the null and void. It is a unique itinerary between sight and blindness. It is unprecedented rewritings of night. It is the unmooring of nomadic things into their dubious future. It is in the image of Icarus: as if one were writing, in an exhilarated suspense, with melting wax. It exposes the flimsiness of our dreams, while refining the ingenuity (and sensuality) with which one furnishes their shortfall. It is where one sketches problematical hopes and half-seen dimensions in italics and tentative parentheses. A fringe language nearly self-erasing. A frayed life-line from crevasse to crevasse. Fragile traces which survive against all that is invalidated. Small harvests gathered into shapes of what one keeps losing. Enigmas which have made their incursions, leaving the voice doubly alert but strangely torn. Word-grafts of the human stamped thinly on the opaqueness and indifference of the world. Verbal residues like Pancino’s potato now rotted away (seen as an earthy but ghostly accompaniment to the poems of Avec la mort, quartier d’ orange entre les dents), leaving a blooded hole to speak of a lingering imperfection in the non-existence. Hesitant negotiations, in a game of warming and cooling, with doubtful would-be partners who bequeath no signature. Brief ceremonies of attempted alliance in places of passage. Such is Bancquart’s habitat. It is a space, however, where words rediscover a lost or tamed violence, where the narrowness of the river-banks engenders an exuberant dynamism, where bursts of sensuality burn the tongue and solder one to this earth with scented fingers, sweetened lips and transfusions of returning life-force, where the page paradoxically finds an angular softness, an almost forgotten tenderness, as it hovers between the holding caress and the collapsing margin, salvaging a suppleness from its own stiffness which somehow transcends, perhaps redeems, those crystallized formations of words in their staccato exile. It is where the word, marvellously, becomes flesh: one may thrust in one’s hand to feel feather, leaf, tree-root and sea-foam in a double life and a shared osmosis which is poetry as love.

21

Introduction

* Why the title: In the flesh of the text? Because the work of Marie-Claire Bancquart, so close to the skin and nerves, and clinging like a glove to the changing relief-map of the interior, seems to invite, as its translation , a method of intimate textual analysis. And to explore the dynamics of a single sustained poetic ‘moment’, by choosing in turn as one’s frame one complete poem, is to further the possibility of meshing with a poet in movement: of sympathetically rejoining the evolving density within, its visceral textures, its multi-directional circuits, its metabolisms and wayward orientations, its variabilities of pulse as they occur, the surges and halts. Working at close quarters, it is an attempt to make of the critic’s words a flexible mirror of the creative process. So one follows all the more confidentially the twists and turns, the advances and backtracks, the troughs and peaks, of an exploration as it unfurls: the unpredictability of a verbal present unveiling the fringes of its future, successively testifying to the provisionality of its own invention and resourcefulness. It is a critical venture which seeks to be, not so much an aftergloss or filtration in retrospect, but an expedition upstream to relive the stages of the metamorphic act which is the poem. For it is the journey, with its uncertainties and evolving relationships, its stresses at each connection of phrase, its emerging light and shadow, which is the significance: those tentative contours, those momentarily established and unreliable fields of force, which are more relevant to the fullness of reading than any thematic overview or summaries of arrival. If to plan a monograph on the selection of seven single texts, as opposed to casting a lasso across the breadth of Bancquart’s work, may appear delimiting, this is balanced by the fact that each highlighted poem is drawn from a separate major collection. Each poem is therefore illustrated within the wider context of that collection, like a small planet within the complex gravitational pull of its own constellation. And in that criss-cross of influences and neighbouring signs of which it is a mobile part, it acquires other approximations of identity, never fully verifiable, as it discovers a company of befores and afters, ancestors and descendants, preludes and subsequent sonorities by which it is relativized. For, even though any one text is the product of the intensities of a unique creative moment never to be

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In the flesh of the text

reproduced, it is not unreasonable to assume that the author has harnessed these pieces together as a collection for some good reason, sensing concordances or at least the scent of a common cause, if only as reflectors of a ‘period’ or significant phase of composition. They are constituents which have all lived within her more or less concurrently and, however allusively or obscurely and in whatever play of affinity or opposition, have tended to feed and stimulate each other. So, each of the seven studies is a singularity and a plurality, a solitude and an ‘otherness’, a closure and an openness, a centre and a decentralization. As a sustained focus on a single poem, each is a literary ‘encirclement’ sensitive to the autonomy and distinctive genesis of the individual text, but an encirclement which is porous to the links, associations, resemblances and near-misses that create patterns of force around it: patterns which dilate the import and definition of the text while rendering it all the more elusive and unpredictable, so profuse, so alternately convergent and divergent, are the potential relationships they scatter around its ‘one-ness’. One identifiable text (in six of the seven cases individually named), claiming its own space and safeguarding its unity, but lit and relit by the disseminating reflectors of the collection as a whole: the multi-facetted hall of mirrors which not only surrounds it but never ceases recreatively to transpierce it from an infinity of directions.

MÉMOIRE D’ABOLIE

(1978)

Définition Je suis l’encolure d’un pays vêtu de toile et d’eau, longtemps ténébreux, maintenant étalé sur la nuit, croisé une fois pour toutes par le crépuscule, et qui entend les soleils célébrer leur courbe. Je suis son oreille, et, dans son oreille, ce qui, bruissant, permet le bruit. Ensemble la saveur des granges nous pénètre, l’odeur d’épis trop mûrs cernés d’une membrane, la trace que laisse aux bouches un lait de terres marneuses. Qui nous occuperait, sauf le son dans nos chairs? Mais suis-je enclave, ou bien ce pays serait le creux nécessaire au violon, l’autour-de-moi facilitant mémoire?

What could be more an enquiry into the capabilities of human self-projection, and an act of problematical self-definition, than the departure of a poem? It is a testing of boundaries. It breaks the finite and revisits its possibilities for recomposition. It is a venture of linguistic metamorphosis and expansion in a zone where final form is in doubt and held in abeyance. It is also where the self, if it ever knew any status quo, goes to meet the infinity of poetic selves, each clothed anew by the reshaping influences of language, which advances also to rediscover itself, never its own replica. Poetry has long grappled with the enigma of the so-called first person. It has also, in the transfer of its heritage, passed on its ghosts, fudging the question of ‘who speaks?’, of which voices haunt one’s own, and how many selves brush against the self of poetry once released into the outreach of words. The ‘Je suis’ of Nerval’s ‘Je suis le ténébreux, – le veuf, – l’inconsolé’1 is an immediate dissolution into a half-light of self where identity bifurcates into a multiplicity of roles looking for common ground. It is little wonder that his sonnet, as it reaches the point of adjusted perspective at the junction of octave and sestet, should undergo a switch from ‘Je suis…’ to ‘Suis-je…’, as the art of statement, however shadowy, tumbles into an oscillation of questions and the energies of antithesis. The Baudelairean first person, gazing out on the slack landscape which is like a depressive filter over the eye of selfhood, says, in words closer to Marie-Claire Bancquart’s juxtaposition of ‘Je suis..’ and ‘un pays’, and posing the question of whether one really reigns over the cloudy horizons of one’s own territory, ‘Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux’2. Beyond which opening line, the text proceeds to unroll the facets of that deceptively simple metaphor, as if spawning the non-relief of its own despair. Rimbaud, in Le Bateau ivre, begins a succession of stanzas with the same initiating ‘Je’ (though with the more devouring, acquisitive verb ‘avoir’ rather than ‘être’): ‘J’ai vu le soleil bas, taché d’horreurs mystiques… J’ai rêvé la nuit verte aux neiges éblouies… J’ai suivi, des mois pleins, pareille aux vacheries hystériques, la houle… J’ai 1 2

‘El Desdichado’ in Les Chimères, Athlone Press, p.43. ‘Spleen’ in Œuvres complètes, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, Gallimard, 1972, p.66.

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heurté, savez-vous, d’incroyables Florides…’3. Here, the ‘Je’ is a single trigger for waves which overwhelm it, for a vastness of time and space which are at its gates and already within it, for this kaleidoscopic undertow which leaves it dwarfed and marginal, a pintsized foreigner marvelling at the colourful excess at the threshold which makes one realize that ‘Je est un autre’. These various voices, echoing distantly in poetic memory, all stress the link between an exploratory self and a space which is its obscure correlative. In each case, there is a turning of the light and a confrontation with the crepuscular: ‘Je suis le ténébreux’, ‘Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux’, ‘J’ai vu le soleil bas’. Twentieth century poetry, though prone to other winds of ‘deconstruction’, has been no less susceptible to the self on the edge of alienation, struggling to recognise itself in that alienation, and compelled to travel the knife-edge of inner and outer worlds where one is simultaneously a psyche and a geography, a body and an uncontainable space. It, too, gropes into the half-light of its own act of creativity to see who it is. Henri Michaux writes in his Je vous écris d’un pays lointain: ‘Je vous écris du bout du monde… Nous n’avons ici, dit-elle, qu’un soleil par mois… L’aurore est grise ici… Est-ce que l’eau coule aussi dans votre pays?’4. André Frénaud, surveying the landscape of his previous poetry, hunts down, in Quelques approches pour un ‘je suis’, the fragments of a self-definition in a collation of extracts where the words ‘je suis’ have appeared, as if to recompose a map, read its lines with more clarity and, via this selective mosaic, see its contours in a new perspective: ‘Je désespère, je suis, je suis un homme qui s’avance dans les champs clos déserts où bruissent mes faux pas’5. Bancquart’s poem is entitled Définition and begins, perhaps over-boldly, with the words ‘Je suis’. Throughout the collection Mémoire d’abolie, both the pronoun ‘je’ and the verb ‘être’ find it hard to achieve solidarity. The ‘Je’ is left frequently stranded, high and dry, as if casting around itself for support, for wider linkages. Such is the case with Femme: Coup du destin Je 3

In Œuvres complètes, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1961, p.70. In Plume, précédé de Lointain intérieur, Gallimard, 1938, p.73. 5 Nul ne s’égare précédé de Haeres, ‘Poésie’, Gallimard, 2006, p.182. 4

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Soulevée en cloque de femme […] Je cueille dans mon corps Je terre et loue la fertilité des cadavres (MA, p.18),

where the pronoun resembles a blockage of identity, caught in a narcissistic minimalism which gathers in nothing from beyond its frontiers. Altruisme (MA, p.25), grappling with the nature of selfgiving and the prickly hybrid which is the moi / autre, has the same symptom showing through the tense stitching of the verse: Toutes mes figures sur les autres Je leur crache à la figure.

A poetic line could hardly leave a syllable more isolated, as a oneword question of its own function. At other times, as in a second text called Femme (MA, p.20), the ‘Je’ is iterated and reiterated as its own struggling replica: Je superpose Je renâcle J’attise au discours de l’homme Je détourne J’absente Je croise un visage buté.

The ‘Je’ here is relaunched inconclusively: a contortionist thrown into action after action, meeting the resistance of its non-fulfilment. Each verb bends its plasticine but to acquire no object, expending energy but never fully transitive. Though singularly constant to itself, the ‘Je’ is a frustrated project: a series of over-active probes to no destination, attempts at outreaching a self which reverts to its skeletonic domain, always a pronoun never a noun. Is a partial explanation in the opening of a piece from Avec la mort: Se changer. Si ce n’était pas de vêtements, mais de soi? Se changer.

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Quelle figure choisiras-tu? (AM, p.86)

In other texts je and moi make an unresolved couple. They form two modes of selfhood, two pentes or opposite slopes between which, in rarer moments of transfer, one slips. Hence the tilting equilibrium and in-and-out rhythm which mark the end of Dieu (MA, p.29): Quand une puissance secrète gonflait le cœur, Moi, Quand le choix se gangrenait, Moi. J’ai réussi mon éclatement. J’étais L’invention de Dieu.

Is it that the ‘Moi’ is complete in itself, while the ‘Je’ has to govern a verb? Is the ‘Moi’ a potential end-product of ‘Je’ the agent? Such is a reading encouraged by a text entitled Retournement (MA, p.35): Je passe entière à travers lui Moi dérive.

Here, too, verb drifts into the verbless, and the active (aware of itself as transition via the space of another) into the passive. The subject of movement becomes movement itself. What was a constituent part of a chain of words is freed as an entity in its own right. A further example which, like Définition, highlights the words ‘je suis’, corroborates the pattern: Ce que je suis le presque rien Le déconstruit de moi vers toi. (MA, p.57).

One cannot refer to reliability of self in such contexts. Two words become a duet of thresholds, a see-saw of precedence. One yields to the other, recedes, loses priority, as it apprehends a new slant or expressive orientation of itself.

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This prompts the conclusion that definition (such as its exists) is between. Almost every poem could write its final equation as Entre les deux Une espèce De présence (MA, p.72).

The upshot is that the ‘last word’ of many texts leaves selfhood exposed, nearly ejected from the subsiding poetic process, as a question-mark over the function of being with its mix of affinity and alienation, collaboration and resistance: ‘Moi, tuteur, ennemi?’ (MA, p.42). Nor is it surprising that numerous so-called ‘finales’ see a splitting or dispersion of possible directions, expressions of the moi contemplating crossroads: Hors de moi C’est la multiplicité de tes yeux qui émigre (MA, p.148).

And as that moi looks across its boundaries, so does the text, towards horizons that it has still failed to explore and make its own. The verb ‘être’ is no more secure. ‘Pas été / Quoi?’ (MA, p.16) are two lines, cleft, confrontational, vainly conjectural, at the centre of a piece embodying its title: Bloqué. Elsewhere, its viability is hedged by Conditionals, by the self-circling speculations of the ‘si’, which never come to rest or find foothold in the verifiable: Si nous étions des inclusions dans l’air sans nous douter? si nous étions le rêve de quelqu’un très précis méticuleux (MA, p.185)

– a ‘quelqu’un’ whose preciseness is belied by the very form and verbal mode into which this poem has fallen. Hence the words of one of Bancquart’s most recent texts, another attempted definition in an inexhaustible cycle entitled Femme (AM, p.43): Je suis quoi? Je suis pourquoi? Glauque.

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Self as the verge of emigration, and the enigma of being as extensive murkiness, are the first emphases of Définition: ‘Je suis l’encolure d’un pays vêtu de toile et d’eau, longtemps ténébreux…’. So, too, is the sense of a singularity drawn beyond the edge of its selfawareness and spilling into a textured and multi-layered ‘otherness’. Not only is that otherness ‘vêtu de toile et d’eau’, wearing veils and inviting dis-cover-y, but the syntax by which it unfurls (‘un pays vêtu… longtemps ténébreux… maintenant étalé… croisé… et qui entend…’) suggests a protracted unveiling, phrase upon phrase, as that ‘land’ breaks into perspectives difficult to co-ordinate in a single sweep of interpretation. ‘Je suis… un pays’: this rolling territory, though a subjective extension, is an ‘objective correlative’, translating the self into a host of declinable equivalents. Self unwraps itself as explorable distance. It sees itself in the mirror of metaphor. It is refigured and reconfigured. Hence the question previously encountered: ‘Se changer / Quelle figure choisiras-tu?’ (AM, p.86). The figure or metaphor here is anything but simple. It is a space of half-assimilable resemblances into which the bareness of the Je (and of the poetic initiative) ventures to prove that it is more than its own starting-point. It is the ground where self and other, containment and overflow, familiarity and foreignness, can negotiate (but must ultimately negate) their common identity. It creates a duality of selfapprehension where, in a blur of frontiers, inside and outside become virtually indistinguishable. It is noticeable that the poem begins, not as ‘Je suis un pays’, but with ‘Je suis l’encolure d’un pays…’. The ‘Je’ is first aware of itself as prominence or promontory, a more elevated vantage-point from which to approach a domain which seems its birthright though a cloudy possession. If, however, there is such a sense of oversight, the comparative security of distance and of the visual dimension are about to be dissolved into the outstretched weft and warp of this ‘text’ which translates, as it spreads, into a two-way transit of sounds, invasive sensations and an actual touch of damp earth on the lips. Few poets have been more probing in their exploration of the geography of the self than Bancquart. Her ‘lands’ are largely uncharted, less than accommodating and hard to cultivate. (One thinks of Henri Michaux’s Mes propriétés6 and the arduousness of dealing 6

In La nuit remue, Gallimard, 1935, p.119.

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with an evasive terrain.) It is there that she burrows, at the least palatable level, as a dwarf form in the profusion of disquieting undergrowth: Restitution de femme À terre saugrenue Je me lègue Un privilège de termite (MA, p.43).

Again one notes the juxtaposition of identity as a woman and the legacy of a half-alien domain. And in a personal space to which noone else has access, she imbibes what she calls ‘l’eau lente au fond de mes terres d’angoisses’ (MA, p.30). The word ‘pays’ sprouts profusely in the sub-soil of these cartographic texts. In Voyages (MA, p.98) one is left in no doubt that such ‘lands’ open widely on time as well as space, while confusing tracks and frustrating clarity of direction: C’est dans tout vieux pays que l’homme difficilement arpente, et le chemin s’arrête où il s’arrête, la piste disparaît quand il tourne la tête.

And if one sees them as the successively rewritten territories of each outreaching poetic act, it becomes apparent that words advance here like illegal immigrants, in the dark of another language: ‘Ils [les mots] peuplent un pays noir sous eux, carie de mon existence’ (MA, p.12). The first poem of Mémoire d’abolie dubbed, though ambiguously, Habitation (MA, p.11) begins by emphasising, not only the ‘space within’ or what Michaux calls his lointain intérieur, but the extent to which one is a foreign body setting off into the itineraries of one’s own self, which unroll as starkly as any external expanse with its forks and crossroads: Je promène au-dedans de moi Une route.

And the last note of the collection, so linking beginnings with ends, is: Autour La terre Qui va loin (MA, p.187).

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Distances within and outer distance cannot easily be dissociated. They are corollaries of each other. Hence a phrase such as ‘Toute clairière étend l’espace de mon corps’ (MA, p.173). Hence also the tracing of ‘un territoire entre deux seuils’ (MA, p.55), where one looks both into the psyche (‘Je suis…’) and outwards (‘… un pays’) at the same time. Poetry is an exercise of space. It is a frame wishing to abolish itself as frame: ‘et puis cette fenêtre à l’univers, on voudrait sortir définitivement par elle. Sortir la fenêtre, après’ (MA, p.32). It is a verbal venture seeking to transcend its own visible and material contours, as in the example of these words, which clutch towards some other edge: ‘Les mots je les écris depuis la rive de ton corps’ (MA, p.53). It aspires to extend its own ‘habitation’ in the direction of one less circumscribed, less watertight, lit from a different hearth: ‘Mon corps parasité de ton espace rouge’ (MA, p.39). It is a space within a space, space to the power of two. The unfurling of a landscape in the self is a sign, rarely transparent, of access to other shores. It is the intimation, not only of imaginative passage, but of a more panoramic act of possession that goes beyond the gaps of one’s normal piecemeal ownership: Juste une minute J’apercevrai le grand paysage Qui remplacera des espaces non possédés (MA, p.47).

Is it even, in its doubling of ‘bodies’ and enlargement of horizons, in its suddenly restored facility to see self in the other and the other in self, a disconcerting form of love? Can a vision of countryside be an impassioned form of words like lovers twinned, as in this duo of semimatching voices: Drôle de campagne Drôle de poème d’amour (MA, p.67)?

Such a conjecture gains force in the following couplet, with its juxtaposition of bedroom scene and landscape scene in a joint state of ‘readiness’: ‘Les amants montent l’escalier. Le pays alentour se dispose pour être surmonté’ (MA, p.138). This does not mean that the pays which is one’s metaphorical ‘second self’ is not equally a place of enigma and exile. One reads elsewhere: ‘Un paysage / Serait prison’ (MA, p.116), ‘Je n’ai rien

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trouvé qui m’exile davantage’ (MA, p.21). However intricately woven before the mind’s eye as a complex of exploration, the bond between place and being is not self-evident and may at times, belying the affirmative value of ‘Je suis’, seem non-existent: ‘aucun lieu d’être’ (MA, p.104). In an unstable demi-jour erasures are endemic: ‘Pas de balise humaine au paysage’ (MA, p.134). And that expedition into the mirror of a foreign language, all in disruptive signs which frustrate the search for resemblances may, while still creating a ‘poème d’amour’, be one of anguish and only tattered self-recognition: Voyage terrible de nous Vers les balafres du miroir

(MA, p.87).

What, then, is the composition of lines proposed in Définition? The advance into their criss-cross may not be a ‘voyage terrible’, but they form an evolving obscurity. If Nerval, in El Desdichado, first characterizes the poetic self as ‘le ténébreux’ (before adding to the mix the sense of severance, missing parts and slow-healing wounds), then in Bancquart’s poem, too, the adjective ‘ténébreux’ is a prime colouring agent. It is a word which permeates many of her texts and textures, bringing not only the touch of darkness which invites and resists, but the porosity and dissolution of contour which are a sine qua non of transaction. It is a word which facilitates the unchaining of the ‘word’. One feels its influence in L’ennemi (MA, p.23) in the evocation of an ambivalent second person in oneself, diffused as on blotting paper, of whom it is said, ‘Il a, le premier, tenté la ténèbre de moi’. At another time, more closely meshed with landscape and the task of unifying the scrambled messages of the natural elements, it descends over the relations between first and second persons and the mysteries of a potential ‘passover’: ‘Mais la colline, avec ses brisures, ne ressemblerait jamais à la mer. Je sens de la ténèbre autour de toi’ (MA, p.63). Emphasising the question of beginnings, as if text and self hung at that threshold, the word ‘noir’ joins the orchestration: ‘Commencer par la nuit de toi?’ (MA, p.128). It refers not merely to the illilluminated underside of self, like the dark side of the moon, called on as the fount of creative depth and a starting-point, but also to a veiling of known identity and its erasure. (Is it a like process which occurs in the first verse of Définition, as it slips from the initial clarity of selfpossession implicit in ‘Je suis’ towards the blur of ‘ténébreux’?) The

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darkening is also a release into space, synonymous with journeying. Aimer begins its flight of infinitives with the words, Parcourir des plages En son nocturne (MA, p.140),

where darkness and emission of sound coincide in a new-found freedom of expanse. Another text concludes with a veiled light playing its variations to-and-fro over a dubious land – such as the ‘pays’ of Définition – which is a metaphorical double, bringing together the endroit and envers of a single rich, shrouded identity: ‘Elle se fait reconnaître au gris empli et désempli du ciel, sur un pays secret dont celui-ci est la doublure’ (MA, p.184). If, then, the ‘pays’ is the dark underlay of a mirror without which no image will form, then entry into it via the text is a shadowy act of self-recognition. C’est de moi restée seule Que je délivre Le noir des ressemblances (MA, p.76),

says Bancquart. The opening of Définition retraces that process: on one hand stands ‘Je suis’, as if self-contained in its questioning solitude; and over the brink, the obscure vistas of likeness ready to be released. If the unveiling of the ‘pays’ is a journey into visual and mental space, then it is also, in keeping with the collection’s title Mémoire d’abolie, a journey into precarious dimensions of time. For time, having long been static or uniform, is shown in that one instant (the instant of the intervention of poetry?) to undergo a radical change or upheaval. The vision in prospect, having been ‘longtemps ténébreux’, is ‘maintenant étalé sur la nuit’: no longer of the dark or itself shrouded but, at this pivotal moment, laid out upon the dark, set against it as if on a contrasting background enabling differentiation. The temporal sequence ‘longtemps… maintenant… une fois pour toutes’ captures in a single sweep past, present and future, as if boundaries of vision, self and time were affected together by enlargement and transformation. For the textual advance is a slow alchemy, where shifts of direction and relationship are already in progress. Vertical (the height of ‘encolure’) interplays with horizontal (the spread of a country ‘étalé

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sur la nuit’). Something which was an unvarying state (‘longtemps ténébreux’) becomes shot through with an endless vitality of halflight, (‘croisé une fois pour toutes par le crépuscule’). The uniform blanket of the ‘ténébreux’ is not the same as the pliable ‘betweenness’ which is twilight. ‘Croisé’, suggesting a criss-cross of exchange, implies also entry and departure, penetration and passage: the passage being, among other things, that of transmissive light. Indeed, access to temporal movement is conveyed not only by the rolling sequence of ‘longtemps… maintenant… une fois pour toutes’ but, as words advance, by the perceptible progression of light and its interventionist energy: from unrelieved shadowiness to a mottled clair-obscur to the bulge of rising suns. At the same time the poem, though barely past its doorway, slips from the funereal (‘vêtu de toile et d’eau’) to a note of the celebratory and the foretaste of fulfilment. Perhaps this groping journey into ‘another land’, involving as it does an overstepping of the simple ‘Je…’ in exchange for richer hints of ‘illumination’, is what is alluded to elsewhere in the lines: Tâtonnements de notre vie Effort d’éclipse Pour retenir soleil (MA, p.125).

Almost at once the poem discovers the multi-directional. It becomes a liberation of lines, not simply in the literary sense. Straight lines (horizontals and verticals), diagonal lines and parabolas intertwine. The ‘courbe’ as the last traced figure of the initial sequence prefigures the promise of a circular or cyclic ‘universe’: of a moment of coincidence when one might be persuaded of ‘la courbe de la tête égale à la courbe de terre’ (MA, p.152). Does one sense, in this kind of planetary pull, the vibrations of another poetic predecessor? For Rimbaud, invoking the same image in Mystique, writes: ‘Tous les bruits désastreux filent leur courbe’7, while in Being beauteous he describes (in an almost geometric sense) ‘des cercles de musique [qui] font monter, s’élargir et trembler’8 the body of beauty in motion. The poet of Définition has brought together, not only dark and light, water and fire, straight lines and curves, but has, like Rimbaud, conjured a

7 8

Œuvres complètes, p.140. Ibid., p.127.

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synaesthetic interplay of sound as vision and vice versa: ‘et qui entend les soleils célébrer leur courbe’. Élargissement is a feature of the creative process. Hence the contribution of the phrase ‘maintenant étalé’. It is a word which recurs with an insistent significance. Wishing to fuse the painter’s spatial art and a poet’s verbal equivalents, and speaking of a textured space akin to this ‘pays vêtu de toile’ (seen as cloth and artistic canvas), Bancquart writes Si j’étais peintre Ton dedans Je me l’étalerais sur un espace de chaîne et de trame (MA, p.53).

The emphasis is again on the translation of inner space into an expanding ‘outer’ space: a foreign land, like poetry, intricately woven to unscroll as words (or a painter’s strokes) emerge from a mental hinterland into the spreading realm of visible signs. The ‘pays’ of Définition may not be a promised land but more a place of unfulfilled glimmers. It corresponds nevertheless to the land evoked, via the same verb and with the same volitional ache, in the following extract: Terre promise non tenue Sauf aux racines Je voudrais étaler tes cages de chair Tes jardins mûrs de pluie (MA, p.76).

The verb ‘émerger’ is its close colleague, suddenly freed to claim a space of its own in another text (MA, p.140). It is as if that ‘outspread’ were the rupturing of a cocoon, the cocoon here being the containing bubble of the words ‘Je suis…’, a first sheath left behind as alternative colours begin to flourish. It resembles a process of rebirth: a model of the word (or silence) made flesh and given body. L’épaisseur de ta nuit S’éprouve hanche S’étale ventre (MA, p.74),

one reads.It marks a passage from the notional to the act, and to the unconfined two-way traffic of that act (where ‘va-et-vient’ echoes ‘croisé une fois pour toutes’ as part of the art of weaving):

39

Mémoire d’abolie …mais que dites-vous, au contraire étalez. On étale, avec un geste va-et-vient des doigts (MA, p.94).

If the space of selfhood undergoes enlargement, then so, fitfully through Bancquart’s excursions, does its time. Rimbaud is again a luminary: Rimbaud whose Illuminations exemplify a revolutionary elastication of the time-space status quo. In À une raison, where a mere ‘coup de doigt’ (on the stretched skin of poetry) unleashes a plethora of sounds and intuitions of a new harmony, he writes: ‘Change nos lots, crible les fléaux, à commencer par le temps’, te chantent ces enfants.9

In Bancquart’s Ville one has, on the one hand, a vision of constricted avenues, oppressive lines, deadened space and a throttled chronology of hours and minutes with no windows on a deeper past: De vigne morte à butte sans oiseaux Des villages éteints Dans la mémoire de ses rues Ses vieux espaces patients Enroulé de boulevards Elle s’en va au temps sec des horloges (MA, p.161).

It is a vision such as may have prompted the desperation of the first line of Recherche (MA, p.119) – ‘Sans doute y eut-il d’autres heures. Je ne peux m’y habituer’ – just as an exasperated Rimbaud in Mauvais sang exclaims: ‘Vite! est-il d’autres vies?’10. On the other hand, as the poetic probe sounds a new space, language can seem shot through with a new time, by which it is ‘aerated’ and able to experience itself in a new mix, as if turned inside out. ‘Je te parle d’une langue mêlée de temps / Réversible’ (MA, p.67), says the voice of D’une fougère bleue les veines. And, as that title hints, a more liberal taste of time may be instrumental in a transfusion of ‘bodies’, and an intimacy of nature felt through one’s own: Des champs de blé colorent notre corps à corps L’horloge énorme 9

Ibid., p.130. Ibid., p.94.

10

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In the flesh of the text Ne sonne pour aucun train Des fruits géometriques sont oubliés sur la place (MA, p.111).

Indeed, it is time restored to itself, no more an amputee, which frees the poet to become the most available of ‘travellers’: ‘Le temps démutilé fait signe de bateau’ (MA, p.134). To speak of hearing the sun consummating its curve suggests a voice of time. It is only one step to see in poetry the exercise of a time-language endowed with parabolas of energy, a rise and fall of utterance in figures, and forms of sound. It is a journey, too, into the creator’s mental etymology, into the strata of her archives, an itinerary from linguistic past to linguistic future waiting to be concretized on the page. It is a rereading and a rewriting, a retrieval and a relaunch. It is an attempted reconciliation of ‘times’ (and speeds of experience) not always easily brought to unity. ‘Trouver une langue’11, writes Rimbaud. Bancquart’s work is no less sensitive to the uncertainties of poetic language as it parlays between outer and inner ears, balances (or loses balance) near edges, heeds the murmurs of the ‘bouche d’ombre’ (AM, p.109) and pushes into alien territory towards the strange sonorities and semantics of its own définition. How does one pin down and define, for example, the dubious leakage of linguistic possibilities, like genetic perspiration in the pores of the mind, which occurs in that back-room of consciousness which is sleep and makes its inroads with no respect for territorial order: J’ai peur de mon sommeil […] quand les mots sortent pour envahir la peau des autres, madrépores. Ils peuplent un pays noir sous eux… (MA, p.12)?

One is never far from the upsetting interventions – and demands for compromise – of ‘sa langue sous les mots’ (MA, p.87). Phrases break through in profusion not amenable to one’s own dictate but which, while refusing to be ‘read’, insist on becoming the food of expression: Phrases toujours brouillées Non par mon jeu mais par une illisible rancune (MA, p.19).

11

Ibid., p.252.

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There is a sense in which the poem, in loosening the restrictive practices of a complacent man-centred language, lays itself open to a fluidity which it cannot properly structure and to which it can only respond in excited but disconcerting ad hoc bursts: Après rupture des barrages à hommes, l’improvisation est la seule bouche possible (MA, p.162).

Poetry, for Bancquart, is a language between: between its own definition and its ‘un-definition’, between processes of composure and swirls of self-undoing, between forme and informe. The tug-of-war is, or so it seems, its condition for being. References abound to the conflictual energies which hold it there, more as linguistic oscillation, a balance of unresolve, than as finished product. Je défais tout Ne trouve plus ni toi ni mon langage (MA, p.63),

she writes, as if dislocated both from her own language and from the object which originally enticed her in its direction. She adds, with the emphasis falling less on language in relation to some notional metalanguage than on the confusion of alternative ‘tongues’ competing for precedence: Entre des langues ambiguës Je distingue malaisément (MA, p.64).

In other phases of expression one feels the disastrous precariousness of words, formed in the hiatus between presence and absence, between a palpable fatness of formation and eclipse: an unreliability of duration and origin which makes them a non-belonging while leaving a clinging reminder that one’s mouth is empty. The beginning and end of Bilan (MA, p.38), a balance-sheet of the credits and debits, profit and loss, of the enterprise of poetry, read as follows: Il fit bourgeon Et l’absence De bourgeon dans la feuille Il fit la parole possible […] Ou bien si la parole

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In the flesh of the text Disparaîtra dans la bouche étrangère Qui me colle aux lèvres en respiration mal prêtée?

The mobilization of language between what buds and what fails to bud or has still to find fertile form is one definition of poetry, a definition qualified here by an ‘ou bien’, by a wavering of alternatives which make its ‘inspiration’ only a breath on temporary loan, a verbal prompting physically real but as volatile as the wind. It is a definition, too, which, in its image taken from the natural world (‘bourgeon dans la feuille’), highlights a feature of this writing: its tireless communications with an ‘earth-language’, embodied here in Définition by the translation of ‘Je’ as ‘pays’ and the advance into its budding signs. In D’une fougère bleue les veines, a title fusing blood and sap as twin systems of life-support, she writes: Poète J’ai mon ticket de grelottement Entre une voix de terre et autre part (MA, p.53).

It is that permit of tremulous travel between a language rooted in the physical universe and another alien one which leads the poet, echoing Rimbaud, to say in the same poem: ‘Trouver langage d’herbe et de radiolaire’ (MA, p.62). To find such a language – that of other lifeforms with their own vocabulary, resonances and pattern – is to relinquish a taken-for-granted consciousness (and self-consciousness) in order to sound a void which disfigures speech: Je voudrais l’après-conscience, quand se mêle aux paroles à peine déshabitées le neutre des poissons, des sables (MA, p.117).

So, one hears the following plea for alternative alliances of the word: … si des paroles voulaient bien dire autre chose qu’elles, si elles pouvaient tenir encore un cri de juillet sur l’espace (MA, p.169).

To hold inside the frame of words or a shared linguistic space what may be voiceless, or not obviously reducible to figures of speech, is the Herculean task of poetry: tu es cet absorbeur tremblant des mots

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qui aimerait les attifer en non-paroles entrant direct dans la circulation du sang (AM, p.109).

That ‘autre chose que les paroles’, the ‘non-paroles’ which escape the friction of everyday spoken commerce, make of poetry an inventive and tormented art of balance between fixation of sound and erasures by silence. And if that ‘in-between’ is of no determinable place, then it has little purchase for expression. ‘Mais il pleut entre vous et moi. Je ne vous dirai pas’ (MA, p.22), are the final words of Déchiffrage. The interactive space of self and world, too, is a hovering between sound and silence, between an incoming wordless breath and the articulation of an audible reply: Flottements d’espaces jumeaux Entre souffle et parole (MA, p.179).

The poetic contract is to vivify such ‘flottements’ as it converts silence to itself and itself to silence. Hence the statement: Quelque part Hors de votre parole Votre parti est pris (MA, p.24).

While language weaves its variabilities, the quiet to which it returns and by which it is tested and permeated is undifferentiated and beyond division. It is akin to ‘le neutre des poissons’ or what is ‘sans ride’ (MA, p.164). It is neither masculine nor feminine, neither self nor other. It represents, aurally and non-aurally, what André Frénaud calls ‘l’identité de l’identité et de la non-identité’12. One coaxes it knowing that it retreats, somewhere between dialogue and taciturnity, concession and intransigence, assimilation and alienation: Le silence est le même Savoir s’il aime on s’il est en exil? (MA, p.164).

Words are there, however, to hint at it, make shapes around it and carry its aura round their own dark forms, suggesting its perfection by their lacunes, releasing a tacit potential which shames the common hubbub of distraction and destruction: 12

Notre inhabileté fatale, Gallimard, 1979, p.67.

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nos paroles du moins étaient comme un silence de dormeur qui rêve au silence en plein fracas des bulldozers (AM, p.115).

The ‘pays’ has declared its hand as a country of sound in the speed of an image: ‘et qui entend les soleils’. Vision and its linear forms become sound, synaesthetically synchronized. Correspondingly the ‘je’ discovers itself, in its widening self-definition, as overlapping functions in a single body. As Rimbaud yields to the celebratory explosion of his being beauteous and its ‘cercles de musique’, he dons a new corporal (corporate) identity: ‘Oh! nos os sont revêtus d’un nouveau corps amoureux’. As ‘oreille’ to that ‘pays’, the subjectivity of Définition (the voice on the page before us) acquires a reverberating intermediary significance. ‘Je suis son oreille, et, dans son oreille, ce qui, bruissant, permet le bruit’. The ear becomes container and content, receiver and transmitter, outer object and inside function, destination and source. It is the crux of a transfer of ‘bruissements’: incoming and outgoing, resonated on the sensitivities of a tympanum only to be carried back, there to stir new whispers without which there would be silence. The syntax of this paragraph is interesting. The first clause, ‘Je suis son oreille’, simple in grammatical structure with an unbroken line to itself, refers to the external organ as an entirety. The second clause, ‘et, dans son oreille, ce qui, bruissant, permet le bruit’, describing the less determinate movements within, slipping to-and-fro and difficult to localize, breaks into a flutter of parts with little continuity: a line affected by ‘interference’, by an inner parasitage from elsewhere, by which brisure and bruissement share a near-identity. Taken as a whole, this short paragraph, homing in on the mysteries of sound, is the muted centre of the text. The richer descriptive vocabulary and complexity of imagery of the first paragraph are shed, leaving only the quintessential relationship of two words, repeated as if looking at themselves and at each other in a mirror, a double duplex: ‘oreille… oreille’, ‘bruit… bruit’. Is one of the basic itineraries of poetry from visual to aural to visceral? For the transaction of sounds in the text leads almost instantaneously, not into an increasingly abstract realm, but to a more sensualized level of immersion. The ear not only records sound but promotes its lavish expression. The subsequent paragraph, as the next

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stepping-stone of self-exploration and the creative process, celebrates a new degree of physical union. Instead of ‘Je suis l’encolure d’un pays…’ or ‘Je suis son oreille’, where the subject is perceived as the appendage to a greater body, or instead of things seen against a background as in ‘étalé sur la nuit’, it evokes absorption of that ‘Je’ into the intensely flavoured universe of a wider selfhood: ‘Ensemble la saveur des granges nous pénètre…’. It is as if the very recognition of the self as sound unlocked a concert of the senses. If the first paragraph was mainly visual (with effects of dark and light on landscape), and the second aural (with nothing but one’s ear and transits of the audible), the third releases sensations of touch (‘nous pénètre’), scent (‘l’odeur d’épis’) and taste (‘la saveur des granges’ or ‘la trace que laisse aux bouches un lait de terres marneuses’). These compose an ‘ensemble’: let in as one wave, all the more enveloping in that taste and scent, more than the visual, impregnate the physical being. There is a sense of ripeness and fullness, amplified by these being fruits of a late season, after-tastes (‘trop mûrs’, ‘que laisse aux bouches’) rather than things to come. Crops have been garnered (‘la saveur des granges’), the smell of the ‘épis’ has mellowed, things are plump (both the seeds and the ‘terres marneuses’ enriched with silt or clay). The stanza conveys, not dearth, but vital nourishment on the lips (‘laisse aux bouches un lait…’): the taste of poetry in the succulence of metaphorical moments. One can hardly over-estimate the importance for Bancquart of communication with the ‘voix de terre’ or, translated differently, the ‘langage d’herbe’. The image of ‘blé’, as a miniature of a larger ‘univers moisson’ (MA, p.45), is a frequent condenser of that voice. Spatialement (MA, p.110) begins with the lines: On sèmerait, on récolterait, on pétrirait le pain d’espace.

In a similar burst of transformational impetus ferried on Conditionals (with their fruition in potential), she writes: ‘Je réveillerais le seigle’ (MA, p.46). ‘Têtus en forme de graines’ (MA, p.129) is the opening characterization of Tableau, introducing hybrid dramatis personae determined to prosper, despite unpromising soil, in the body of nature. ‘Des champs de blé colorent notre corps à corps’ (MA, p.111) is another first line, indicating how fluently a mention of ears of wheat

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(‘oreilles’ with a ‘bruissement’ of their own) can seed a poem, then to drink in its phases of nourishment in order to expand and attain new verbal form. ‘La terre te pousse racine’ (MA, p.168), one reads. Roots, like seeds, crave moisture. Numerous texts in Mémoire d’abolie, as they ‘divine’, expose crevices to water. It may be the quenching at which one arrives at the end of Vies (MA, p.102): ‘À boire, le coup du cœur périssable qui vire en tournesol’, where the spurt of refreshment and mortality go hand in hand, nurtured from seed to sun and translating into a radiant natural form. It is as if the skin lining human existence were surprisingly open to the sounds and movements of a fluidity which can roam both sides: Nos corps À peine des parois Clapotis D’un côté l’autre de la peau (MA, p.113).

One might speak of blood flowing into another stream and vice versa: into that ‘eau qui serait la grande hémorragie de notre corps’ (MA, p.118). And see, in this liquid absorption (reflected in Définition by the tasting of a ‘lait de terre’ and the dampness of ‘argile’), a breach in one’s anthropocentric resistance and a surrender to a native unanimity: Quand le miel des plages nous absorbera, nous aurons cessé de conspirer contre le monde (MA, p.120).

The avidity of the bodily language in Bancquart’s poetry is often startling. Scents and tastes burst in on the text, tug at its resources, dictate new shapes and reroute it. Toute clairière étend l’espace de mon corps […] Ouverture ou dévoration par odeur d’humus? (MA, p.173),

is a question which hangs gaping, between options, at the heart of Vie. In D’une fougère bleue les veines, body and the smell of blackberries are suddenly welded, as if never really apart: ‘Corps secret à l’odeur de mûre’ (MA, p.54). The last line of Difficile (MA, p.167), as though the difficulty in question had been afforded a provisional unity

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allowing the temporary closure of the act of words, is ‘Greffe de notre corps sur des odeurs et le poil des étoffes’: body, scents and touch conspiring as one organism. The image of the receptive mouth recurs in Sans nous (MA, p.106) to illustrate, not that plenitude of the senses which swells the third paragraph of Définition, but its converse, a radical separation between savours of fruits or inviting liquids, and a deprived mouth in waiting. These are the beginning and end of the piece, a negative embrace which constitutes its structure: Fruits, déclosions de saveurs sans nul échange avec les bouches. […] d’autres dérives délicieuses sur une mer non réunie à nos salives.

Does one conclude that the evolution of Définition as text and as selfexploring project – passing from spatial and temporal vistas, to an exchange of sounds, to the fruits of a physical penetration – is an illustration of access via the act of words to that ‘dévoration par odeur d’humus’ and to the ‘déclosions de saveurs’ (in this instance in the mouth and round the rim of the mouth) which are a proof, however short-lived, of poetry’s fruition as body? If the references to ‘épis trop mûrs’ and to traces left in the mouth by the milk of the earth are signs of an experience taken to fullness and beyond, they are also, arguably, threats of transience and departure. And if ‘Je suis’ has been absorbed into the sensual layering of a ‘nous’, it is not long before ‘togetherness’ becomes its own enigma and sends the text back finally into the interrogative mode which shades its last notes. For ‘ensemble’ implies the joining of the ‘je’ in a collectivity, ‘pénètre’ a breaching of mere selfhood, and ‘nous’ a twin or multiple identity. It is not therefore surprising that the third stanza which after two stanzas led by ‘Je suis…’ undergoes an obscuring of the first person, should be supplanted by the brusque ‘Qui…?’. The question-form makes a double impact. Linking with the title Définition it asks: who is self? what does ‘je’ mean? what are its properties and limits? More especially it enquires, following the evocation of penetrated boundaries, into the nature of that hypothetical ‘occupying force’. If one’s ‘country’ has been invaded, by what or by whom? Does one harbour within some nameless identity from the ‘other side’? Can one give name to the word ‘Qui’ or draw lines around it? Such questions are brought to a head in the formulation: ‘Qui nous occuperait, sauf le son dans nos chairs?’. It balances against

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each other options of transcendence and immanence, of a presence beyond the self and a mere note or disturbance within the self: a ‘visitation’ with no reference elsewhere, but with such a reverberation distinct from functions of the flesh that one is inclined to read into it more than is available and attribute it to origins beyond the troubled arena of these ‘mortal coils’. That the ‘Qui’ may be solely ‘a sound in the flesh’ brings one back to the conjecture that this ‘pays’ is a ‘pays de la poésie’, and that every verbal step through it is an enquiry, projected on a screen and ‘objectivized’, into the reflective depths of the poetic act. As Frénaud writes: ‘Où est mon pays? C’est dans le poème’13. For poetry is essentially ‘a sound in the flesh’, a sound beyond which interpretation, identification and import stay unknown. The final question of the text elaborates that uncertainty. It also returns to the ‘Je suis’ formula appearing at the head of sentences but, now that it has passed through the filter of a problematical ‘Qui’, presented in reverse (‘suis-je…’) and no longer commanding the same assertive role. The issue is not that of transcendence versus immanence. Nor is it philosophical. In the final analysis (or nonanalysis) it assumes the ‘in-between’ language of metaphor. So, the ‘conclusion’ wavers between poles of possibility. Is one the circumference, a delineated domain or territory, or the ill-defined hollow at the centre, looking for itself in an evolutionary dark with no idea of ultimate shape? Is one the pendulum between what is ‘cerné’ (as earlier in ‘cernés d’une membrane’) and what is not? Is one the clarity of the container or the murkiness of the contained? The self sees itself as surround (‘Mais suis-je enclave’) and as the surrounded (‘l’autour-de moi’): as the defining circle and the ‘un-defining’ hole inside, simultaneously plein and vide. So, the ‘pays’ of the self may not be a place of external perimeters, but the ‘creux’, the dark interior, vaguely surrounded by contours one knows nothing of. ‘J’étais née pour m’enfermer centrifuge’ (MA, p.61), says Bancquart, as if to summarize the paradox of the centripetal which is the centrifugal, and self-containment which is a dispersal. Numerous texts arrive at an exposure of the creux within themselves which may be, not only their creative sponsor, but the nearest approximation they will have to a definition. ‘Mon creux je le voyage’ (MA, p.64) writes the poet (and what is Définition but such a 13

Il n’y a pas de paradis, ‘Poésie’, Gallimard, 1962, p.137.

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travel-poem?). Propriété (MA, p.142), with its double meaning of property as owned dwellings and as the defining constituent of a physical compound, ends with the words: De tes fissures J’extrais mon identité creuse.

It is, indeed, the creux which is not just a facilitator but almost (as it sticks to the questioning ‘suis-je?’) a raison d’être. In Retournement one reads, in a further glimpse of the wholeness which is the hollow: quelqu’un dit moi creux Je passe entière à travers lui (MA, p.35).

And in Avec la mort, quartier d’orange entre les dents it is confirmed (the verb ‘pénétrer’ echoing with Définition): Si tout est creux nous nous insinuons nous sommes pénétrés aussi

(AM, p.96).

The creux, porous by definition, enables (even necessitates) those secretive two-way movements by which one enters and is entered, permeates and is permeated, ‘occupies’ (as if someone else’s land or a foreign country) and is occupied. The title Retournement is revealing. It points to a kind of réversibilité, to the way in which, in an overthrow of the set order of things, self can be turned inside out or perceive itself simultaneously as outside and in. ‘J’inverse ton corps dans ma nuit’ (MA, p.72), says one speaker. Another observes an interference of spaces which sees ‘Mon corps parasité de ton espace rouge’ (MA, p.39). The utterance of words between one domain and the other, reality and dream for example, may spring an about-turn on the part of nature, affecting its normal balance of enclosure and receptivity: ‘Dans le sommeil, je te parle. L’arbre s’est retourné’ (MA, p.63). Indeed, does the ‘otherness’ of speech in poetry depend on going through the mirror and essaying both the coat and the lining, l’endroit and l’envers? The first words of Autrement (MA, p.49) give a partial answer:

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In the flesh of the text Pour dire Autrement Je tourne le miroir […] Autrement dit m’écorche étale mon envers.

Définition is a study of such boundaries. The inner je becomes pays. The self, from being a haven, becomes its own foreigner. It is both the ear trained infinitely on elsewhere and the sounds in the depth of that ear. It is the invader and the invaded. It is filled and emptied in one fell swoop. It is the unstable, malleable equation of l’intérieur du moi and l’autour-de-moi, the signs of which incessantly change sides. As Bancquart elliptically asks in a poem ending, as does Définition, with a question-mark hanging over the musical instrument: L’univers en nous nous dans l’univers comme âme d’instrument qui (des fois) sonnerait juste? (AM, p.61).

If Définition is a poem of betweens, one should not overlook the appearance, in its final developments, of the ‘ou bien’ formula. For it is not a text of reconciliation but one split, nowhere more acutely than in its finale (a ‘place’ of conditionals, questions and uncertainties of place), between alternatives and slants of interpretation, between the shores of a self which could be either-or: ‘Mais suis-je enclave, ou bien ce pays serait le creux…?’. It ends with the unsteadiness of a basculement. Bilan (MA, p.38) closes on the same stylistic formula and a corresponding interrogative hesitancy between what is measurably contained and what recedes towards alien origins, between language (or the play of sounds) within one’s mouth and language insecurely borrowed and harking to somewhere else: Le quatrième temps peut-être dans la mesure de mon corps Ou bien si la parole

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Disparaîtra dans la bouche étrangère Qui me colle aux lèvres en respiration mal prêtée?

The conjunctive but disjunctive ‘ou bien’ is a symptom and a synonym, if not of a creux, then of a gulf between the opposite banks of selfhood. Is it indeed the gulf or écart that one inhabits and which is the contradictory pays of one’s definition. The emphatically titled Oui, l’intervalle (AM, p.59) reads, at beginning and end: Tu crois te dépouiller de l’intervalle? […] tu ne fais qu’un avec l’écart mince, fondamental, vers le début d’abîme et le début de joie.

These last five lines, kept apart by the slightest of monosyllables, by the infinitesimal, are the illustration, not only of alternations of expansion into space and retraction, but of two movements which can only be débuts, never to be consummated except as twinned experiences of the edge – one of loss, one of possession; one of withdrawal, one of receipt – of which the poet is the pivot, seismic needle of the écart. Elsewhere she evokes her solidifying but sounsolid presence entre la caresse et la marge (MA, p.69).

Définition embodies that ‘in-between-ness’. It is touched on the lips, even lightly penetrated, only to rejoin the fringe of the inaccessible beyond which nothing is retained. It knows itself as intensified sensual focus, and as slippage to the margins. Its last notes are almost ready to be devoured back by the margin, the actual one of the page: a text touched by the combined lushness of the world and the word only to be restored to the silence of the edge where it will lose grip. It falls, indeed, ‘entre la caresse et la marge’, having toured the inconclusive space between ‘le début de joie’ and ‘le début d’abîme’. Almost from the outset, the poem has been concerned with further knowledge of that ‘land’ where sounds of the universe, in the translations of a language whose very nature is translation, are

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received across boundaries: ‘et qui entend les soleils célébrer leur courbe’. It has explored itself as carrefour of sounds, the meeting of outgoing and incoming signals. Questioning the identity of what comes to occupy that space, it can give no further elucidation than that it is ‘le son dans nos chairs’: less a music of the spheres (a fancy momentarily encouraged by suns’orbs tracing audible arcs across the sky) than a music of the entrails. It is therefore appropriate that the last speculative note plays the image of the musical instrument, and of the self (and its ‘sphere’ or pays) as the reverberating hollow of that instrument. It is significant that, as the text ‘matures’ towards its uncertain finale, ‘le bruit’ is replaced by ‘le son’, perhaps as a sign of a small step from indeterminacy and formlessness towards a foretaste of the harmonious. But one may never see the shape and definition of what excites and ‘vocalizes’ the obscure inner space, let alone know by what or whom one is played upon. There is an important lineage of French poems which, as they approach their closure, problematize the ‘music’ which haunts them and of which they are the soon-to-be-curtailed expression. Rimbaud’s Conte ends with the ‘moral’ (disconcerting in that it veers into an zone of reference which has not figured anywhere else in the prose-poem): ‘La musique savante manque à notre désir’14. (It is Rimbaud who, linking poetry with the violin, writes: ‘je lance un coup d’archet: la symphonie fait son remuement dans les profondeurs’15.) Mallarmé, reconjuring Saint Cecilia’s aura from the depths of time in the depiction of a stained-glass window, brings his poem finally to the brink of paradox, where it hovers in the tensions of the heard and the unheard: ‘Musicienne du silence’16. Even the most cursory crossing of Mémoire d’abolie (a title for which the words ‘Musicienne du silence’ might be an imaginative parallel) reveals the symptoms of a dilemma of music. ‘Je déchiffre […] ta partition’ (MA, p.83), declares one voice; while in Mal (MA, p.34), in a phrase revisiting the ‘ou bien…’ formation to imply alternative roles or possible self-perceptions, the poet conjectures: ‘Ou bien si j’instrumente la douleur’. For poetry is an arduous apprenticeship with the more-than-words and the less-than-words. ‘On apprend le murmure’ (MA, p.113) says the speaker of Mer, unsure of 14

Œuvres complètes, p.125. Ibid., p.250. 16 Œuvres complètes, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, Gallimard, 1945, pp.53-54. 15

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how to unscramble, reread and assimilate such a murmur; while in Frêne (MA, p.158) the problem of ‘celebrating’ the bruissement of nature as expressed by a tree takes this questioning turn: Comment te célébrer, sinon ces mots à voix haute que je prends à source confuse? N’avaient besoin de moi pour être dits.

Words, then, which are not only confused and from an unclear source, but with regard to which one is largely redundant and not in ownership. (In Définition, the word ‘mots’ does not figure, but only those scouts of a sub-language ‘bruit’ and ‘son’ gesturing towards a greater fulfilment.) It is as if there were a communication, seeking to emerge beyond sound, to which one would apply the word ‘parole’ but which fails to fit the frame of one’s over-specific verbal forms. It is ‘parole’, but ‘par illusion seule entendue dans le déchet du bruit’ (MA, p.89). As something heard more as illusion than formulation, all the more so among that heaviness of audible fall-out which is the penalty of non-significant voice, such a ‘parole’ leans closer to the airiness of music. Hence the phrase: ‘On ne signe pas les paroles’ (MA, p.130), as if beyond authorship or any self-identifying je. Hence the recognition that one’s ‘house’, the space inhabited in poetry, if it is not to be a mere habitat but a place of love, defies words and leaves one chasing some superior, more appropriate sublimation of sound: Quand on aime dedans Elle est sans phrases nulle part (MA, p.150).

There are therefore depths of experience when the self needs to be silenced. ‘Tais-toi, écoute’ (MA, p.184), one reads in Prise: a phrase which marks a turning-point in the text, quelling the over-emphatic exclamatory mode of the opening lines to make way for a tableau closer to that of Définition, involving a land which is a cryptic double, with effects of half-and-half light, a joy permeating time, and a liquid union with aspects of the natural world: Le miel commence à caresser les écorces. La joie n’est pas de l’an prochain. Elle se fait reconnaître au gris empli et désempli du ciel, sur un pays secret dont celui-ci est la doublure.

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It is not surprising, if such is the prize of silence, that Bancquart should devote a poem to the virtues of Mots cachés (AM, p.113), words not yet revealed and not victim of their own aftermath, of which the ideal medium would perhaps be music, obscure resonances in the hollow of the unknown violin: Le livre que nous n’écrirons pas le vrai nôtre. Mots cachés, retenus. […] Près d’eux, au secret de nos corps, attendent nos inconnues dernières paroles qui seront incomprises de nous et par d’autres écoutées – mais perdues.

The enigmatic last words of Définition – ‘le creux nécessaire au violin’ – are a reflection of those inconnues dernières paroles. As an ending, it leaves the reader hearing but not quite hearing, on the edge of a premonition of music for which the conditions are in place, but which remains a wordless sound in the cavern of being, anticipated at the very moment that that reader is about to slip beyond words. It is not the only time that the uncertainty of last words (and their creative creux) liberates the reader to the strains of something beyond the space and time, however supple, of the text: something which finds no determinable linguistic home. ‘S’efface / dans quelle bouche?’ (MA, p.105) forms the last word of Incertain. So much so, and so much does it chase essences evading the voice, that one wonders what is the validity, as transmissive testimony, of that complex vocalization which is the text. Is it an example of a ‘boursouflure de silence’ (MA, p.59), like a verbal blister or swelling of silence, which imposes its pressure but to which the poet cannot give a name? Or, in the words of a recent collection and to return to the musical metaphor, is it just a fortuitous note, a modified sonority of the moment, in the unknown durée of an extended musical score:

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plus intense de n’être qu’un accident marquant note altérée dans une partition (AM, p.84)?

The final word of Définition, ‘mémoire’, on the brink of the extinction of voice and what is soon to become traces, looks forward to what lies behind. It links with, and by its position next to annihilation symbolizes, the title of the collection, Mémoire d’abolie. It emerges as a surprise point of arrival in the poem, as if memory and recovery had been the secret goals in this reuniting of sound and time. It crystallizes, in a single pulse, the preoccupation with overturning a state of time which threaded the texture in the early sequence ‘longtemps… maintenant… une fois pour toutes’. It is a reminder, too, that the poem itself is an act of memory, removing itself from the gallop of piecemeal time to create, not only a space apart, but a span apart: in which one moves forward and back, melting ‘successives’ into a significant simultaneity that transcends them. Memory, in Bancquart, is not an easy accomplishment. Even here, at the point of conclusion, its entry has only been obscurely ‘facilitated’: loosened in a hypothetical confrontation with the sound of otherness. Memory is not one’s possession. It is not docile but refractory, ‘le souvenir mal élevé’ (MA, p.13), pulling against the grain of notions of order and not obeying the various strategies of ‘upbringing’. It is more an ill-fitting double than a mirror, roaming a space more porous than watertight, more a rupture of containers than a storehouse: ‘Mon souvenir est d’une chambre toute en sel’ (MA, p.15). It is an occasional life-line projected (by the self or from elsewhere towards the self?) between continuity and broken lines, between neglect and a curious repêchage, maybe between sound and nothingness. Si je lance Une bouée de souvenir? (MA, p.17)

are the first words of Silence. The act of memory, in these poems, is not a pleasurable drift into reminiscence and nostalgia. It is a trial by words, arduous, hazardous, uncomfortable. The first phrase of the title-poem Mémoire d’abolie, breaking over that difficult threshold

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which is the act of speech (conveyed as infinitive rather than question), is: ‘Pour remonter la fibre de mémoire, allumer les mots qui font mal’ (MA, p.99). Memory here, clearly, is not a casual, airy excursion, but embodied and visceral, painfully rooted at the heart of being (hence its force as point of arrival in a text so rivetted to the ‘je suis’): ‘Dans le plus être, le plus entrailles, nous buvons des mémoires’ (MA, p.102). Indeed one wonders what kind of memory is at stake. At what depths is it sought and to whom does it belong? To what origins is the poet alluding when she fishes for Ma mémoire ancienne habitante Aux doucereuses profondeurs (MA, p.41)?

Which other space in time has she rejoined, hardly compatible with speech and more conducive to music, when she records: ‘J’habite dans ton corps un passé qui n’ose pas se parler’ (MA, p.60). Is one dealing with processes of disconnection and reconnection, dependent somehow on an erasure of memory, such as that assumed by the writer as she describes herself as ‘appelant l’expulsion de sa propre mémoire’ (MA, p.104)? For it is at that extreme point of selfobliteration that the title Mémoire d’abolie assumes its full significance. So, one leaves Définition at the edge of a sketch of memory of uncertain source and no belonging: a finale which is ‘niché dans nous comme la fin qui rêve encore’ (MA, p.118) and which, if it can still dream, may also be a beginning. It provides the perfect reminder of what the poem, in its harnessing of a dubious ‘je suis’ and a ‘pays ténébreux’, has been throughout as an artistic being: Flottements d’espaces jumeaux Entre souffle et parole (MA, p.179).

OPPORTUNITÉ DES OISEAUX

(1986)

Trains Seule entre la grande neige et l’homme assis une vitre que mange un arbre au passage. Des souvenirs, des ombres sur le train, la hiérarchie d’un monde profondément gelé sous l’eau sèche qui serre les racines. La terre tourne avec ses planètes solidifiées. Dedans dehors multiples de cristaux. L’esprit couve et réfracte sa ténèbre en feu froid Des loutres mènent boire les morts dans les trous libres. L’insaisissable est proche.

The title Trains is a thematic hub for the work of Marie-Claire Bancquart. It is a turntable leading in many directions. To say that it crystallizes the theme of journeying and the problematics of the medium of transport touches merely the surface. It links with a host of more complex underground questions. That, for instance, of outer or inner travel. Henri Michaux speaks, in two of his key titles, of the ‘lointain intérieur’ and ‘l’espace du dedans’. Poetic traveller to Ecuador, the Amazon and the Far East, he also describes himself, in a fictional self-portrait, as ‘sentant passer en lui de grands trains d’une matière mystérieuse’1. The quotation is a reminder, not only that there is an explorable inner space just as navigable and capacious as geographical space, but that the two are mutually provocative, and that any true experience of travel is a two-way mirror and a tremor of cognate worlds. Baudelaire’s work roams at the confines of the innerouter voyage, treading its balance, testing the dilemmas of reality and illusion, the literal and the metaphorical, escape and confinement, selfdissemination and self-enclosure or, in other words, ‘vaporisation et centralisation du moi’. Le Voyage starts from the picture of a child feeding his journeys from maps and prints, fervently undertaking them in the privacy of his room. It proceeds to expose the relativity of all journeying and of the world in which it moves, subject as they are to the turncoat nature of subjective vision and the concertina of perspectives as time squeezes it in and out: Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes! Aux yeux des souvenirs que le monde est petit!2

And on stage finally is a vacuous traveller ‘à qui rien ne suffit, ni wagon ni vaisseau’. Blaise Pascal, problematizing man’s position as a reversible creature entre deux infinis, between the infinite and the infinitesimal, simultaneously capable of expanding as circumference and shrinking to immeasurable dot, tests the proposition, central to the evaluation of ‘space travel’: ‘Tout le malheur des hommes vient de ne

1 2

Plume, p.108. Œuvres complètes, p.122.

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savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre’3. Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, a decadent introspective, takes the issue, the fruitfulness of excursion versus narcissistic retreat, a step further, with his emphatic statement: ‘À quoi bon bouger, quand on peut voyager si magnifiquement sur une chaise?’4. The title connects, therefore, with questions of movement or stasis: not only in the sense of a fixed position in an enclosed compartment, sedentary in essence, subjected to a bombardment of passing perceptions and the challenge of a speeding landscape, but also as an invitation to speculate on progress, on whether, in their successive probes and overall advance, lives are heading somewhere or nowhere. Is there a terminus or is one permanently ‘à mi-chemin’? And how, as one travels, does one approach the space-time equation? Does one live, as Bergson would suggest, between two notions of time: a time measured like kilometres on a track, a chronological ready-reckoner marking where one is, has been and will be, or time as a boundaryless and indissociable durée by which one is lived and which pours at any given moment through the sieve of present consciousness, held in one spot but traversed, harassed or undermined by infinity? A further text from Opportunité des oiseaux (a title evoking the timely arrival of the most adept of space-travellers) suggests the torment of impeded movement as one watches from a threshold, as if mocked by an escaping alter ego: À la porte du dérisoire […] un peu moins mobile que l’huître c’est pourtant notre vie de voyageur distrait (OO, p.39).

Francis Ponge has longed for the recovery of a similar gift of movement, seeking to find it (or a parallel universe) in the juxtapositions and transpositions of poetry: Ô draperies des mots, assemblages de l’art littéraire, ô massifs, ô pluriels, parterres de voyelles colorées, décors des lignes, ombres de la muette, boucles superbes des consonnes, architectures, fioritures des points 3

Pensées (ed. Lafuma), Éditions du Seuil, 1962, p.89: Fragment No 136, ‘Divertissement’. 4 À Rebours, Fasquelle, 1955, p.178.

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et des signes brefs, à mon secours! au secours de l’homme qui ne sait plus danser, qui ne connaît plus le secret des gestes, et qui n’a plus le courage ni la science de l’expression directe par les mouvements5.

Bancquart’s view of poetry may be less ‘architectural’ and in a sense less ornamental than that of Ponge, and veer more brutally towards what Frénaud calls ‘la voix fêlée’ and the tensions of ‘les signes brefs’; but it shares that desire for a ‘live’ sensual language which becomes a form of movement in its own right, awakening a lost heritage to readmit one, however haltingly, to the secret of ‘dance’. Her poetry is one which ‘moves’, which is incorrigibly ‘on the move’, but in patterns hardly recognisable as travel in the usual sense: not the grand journey, nor a spacious displacement for instant refreshment, but something more stuttering, more modest, hesitating at the boundaries of inner and outer worlds, where words seep out at snail’s pace and question the shaky itineraries of their own secretions: what the poet calls her ‘bref tourisme énigmatique’ (OO, p.15). A piece from La Vie, lieu-dit entitled Qui témoigne has the following setting: Gare TGV du Creusot, bâtie comme un hangar au milieu de la vastitude des argiles. Isolés sur un banc, deux clochards et un gros rat gris, qui ne paraît pas en bon état […] J’ai entrouvert mon sac, tâté des mouchoirs, mon portefeuille. J’hésitais. À l’annonce du train, je suis partie sur le quai sans avoir rien offert. Quand le TGV s’est ébranlé, ils étaient encore sur le banc, les clochards et la bête (VLD, p.31).

It is an account dramatizing opposites: the prospect of high-speed movement set against the immobility of human lives consigned to a bench, the depersonalized smoothness of the railway installations (‘Dans le TGV tout est lisse’) versus the vulnerability of the tramps with their wretched half-salvaged animal, the sleekness of line and monochrome efficiency versus the flesh-and-blood raggedness of damaged existences (‘la bête au poil trempé, et le chiffon que le sang rincé a marqué de traces roussâtres’), the sense of destination versus the chronic aimlessness, the reassurance of a home or haven as the goal of travel as opposed to the ‘homelessness’ of those who are ‘out 5

Le parti pris des choses, ‘Poésie’, Gallimard, 1942, p.127.

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in the cold’, the contrast between the urge to reach across the divide, to bridge distances and intervene (‘Mind the gap, please’), and the prevailing sense of severance and exclusion on both sides. That the two derelicts are seen as a diminishing image through a window, as the train moves out, renders more acute the condition of exile and the theme of connections made and connections broken. The protagonists, their lives at variance and pointing in different directions, are ultimately sealed in their separate perceptions of time and space. The poem, in its further developments over nine pages (as if that first departure, via its mechanism of encounter and ‘dis-encounter’, triggered a more extensive journey of the mind) proceeds to follow the poet’s own life ‘as through a glass darkly’: the self as a long trajectory of passing strangers uneasily assimilated. It reflects on the divergent lines that one has travelled, on whether (like Orpheus) there can be any going back into the dark and any retrieval, on which tracks are now out of service or have minimal daily traffic, on the nature of the inner exodus which has occurred and towards what ‘promised land’, and on that shadowy and unpalatable other journey on which one is embarked and of which stations (of the cross or other croisements) are a graphic metaphor: countdowns of time before the snapped thread and the inevitable departure. The opening word of Trains, ‘Seule’, mimes its own meaning. It is unattached. It is a single sliver. In its unsupported thinness it is exposed to a void. The poem, as it ‘utters’, does not register fullness, sensual thickness, multiple contact or verbal fertility, but a bare notion of solitude, unmediated. So much so that one cannot tell initially to whom or what the monosyllable pertains. It might be the poet or another female entity alone, stranded without props, without second opinion, in the no-man’s land between the coldness of a huge expanse and the huddle of human inertia – until, that is, one reads on to appreciate that ‘Seule’ applies, not to a human subject, but to the impersonality of ‘une vitre’, colourless, transparent, characterless: an empty pane waiting for some transaction to occur in a wilderness of divided camps and non-communication. The sequence ‘Seule / entre…’, jerking from one line to the next, is an example of meaning (and the grammatical hierarchy on which it hangs) being slow to emerge. It might be ‘Only the outspread snow enters’: a tempting translation at this point of entry into the poem, until one accepts that nothing exists to sustain the coincidence

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(and its fodder for hungry critical minds), and that ‘entre’ does mean ‘between’, so dismissing a mirage from the glass and erasing notions of inlet and access in favour of those of distance and exterior cold. In the same stroke, the hint of a verb to inject dynamism and make a crossing is replaced by the obstinacy of a stanzaic block sealed on itself, with no main verb to mobilize its contours. ‘Entre’, as a one-word token of the ‘betweenness’ of the human condition and the nature of poetry, is not just a preposition but a centre-pin of the implications of the text. It is the divider between the natural world laid out unrestricted on one side of the window, and the human world in its contracted posture in a compartment on the other. (Is ‘l’homme assis’ here symbolic, as in Rimbaud’s Les Assis 6, of weakened initiative, lost upthrust and lack of poetic envergure?) It also divides horizontal and vertical planes: snow stretching before the eyes in an endless flat landscape, as opposed to the pane at right angles, no less blank like an unwritten page, akin yet at cross purposes. It sharpens the tensions between outer and inner: not only between the all-embracing white and the traveller’s cubicle, but between the sealed smoothness and resistance of that pane and the gesture of penetration emanating from a tree which goes rushing by, a growing life-form pitting its upthrust against the horizontality of the sleek torpedo in motion. The paradox of movement is also honed, in that the passenger en route is assis in fixed position, while the tree, rooted to the ground, seems endowed with speed as it flashes past, groping up and out, defying compartments and the impenetrability of windows. The vitre is a problematic barrier between two orders. It leads one to wonder: what is their relationship? what is the future of their intercourse and are their signals reconcilable? Is the vitre a symbol of poetry as it embarks on its journey: a transparency (like the word ‘Seule’ dropping before the eye like a slide with no image) mediating between outer and inner, a go-between and an impediment, open to communication and deflective? In the same collection one reads: Plaisir dans un fragment très mince entre le bois et nous (OO, p.52).

In Trains that pleasure, should it exist, is slow to reveal itself, locked as it is in the vice of a ‘deep freeze’ where little yields on either hand. 6

Œuvres complètes, p.36.

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The vitre, though, is just such a ‘fragment très mince’, a thin divider slicing the space between the beckoning woodland and an impeded self. On many occasions in Bancquart’s work a similar ‘cauchemar emmuré’ (OO, p.33), linked with evolving variants of the window, taunts the text. Such is the case with Métamorphoses (OO, pp.120-21), where the body becomes a sas or half-way chamber between opening and closure (‘Fermé, ouvert: le corps, mince héritage’). It is in a way a living vitre, the least reliable of partitions between l’espace du dedans and l’espace du dehors, the tensions of which detain the poet at the frontier (etched notably at twilight, entre chien et loup) of access and exclusion: ‘Le soir, elle tient à pleines mains le bois de la fenêtre’. Such is the case, too, with Déni (OO, p.33) which begins: La mort habite ma maison sans fenêtre. […] Le monde exsude pesamment hors de moi.

In this instance, as in Trains, the window is sealed, representing, if not a living death, then a deathly presence squatting in the premises of life. Is that the fate inflicted on the ‘homme assis’? In both cases, while a shadow of death clamps the inside, the mass of the world outside continues to ex-press its humours, to sweat and leak out profusely from the other side of the quasi-impenetrable barrier. They are reminders that, despite one’s screen, nature never ceases to exercise its transmissive density, to make weighty gestures of communication as an invitation not to ignore it or let it pass lightly. Other texts are structured round the image of the closed window and the challenge from the other side: La fenêtre est fermée. Les rideaux ne bougent pas. L’autre côté sentirait la mer. Une figure assise voit, à travers la vitre, son image, debout, les cheveux agités. Une main se tend. Mais la procédure de réunion n’a pas lieu. L’espace commence à ce blanc très solide, entre le ciel de feuilles et l’air clos de la salle. (OO, p.76).

As in Trains, there is an enclosed ‘figure assise’ in a compartment, confronted with ‘ce blanc très solide’ at the frontier of the ‘vitre’ (be it

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expanses of snow or, by Mallarméan association, the wordlessness of ‘le vide papier que la blancheur défend’7): a frontier, nevertheless, which offers a glimpse of an upthrust of wayward movement which might transform his condition (making him cursorily a brother of the ‘arbre’, ‘debout, les cheveux agités’). In the event, however, the contact is not established and the process of union not set in train. That this piece has the title Double is not irrelevant. For, if there were two presences in play, two life-forces skewed at angles, then their briefly revealed potential for unity is obstructed, as follows: Après quelques secondes, les regards cessent de se croiser. Chacun s’arrête sur son reflet convexe dans le fruit. L’homme de l’intérieur bientôt se remet à écrire, pendant que l’autre recule jusqu’à l’imperceptible…. .

And the man behind the pane (or the page), deprived of any more authentic fusion, returns to writing, that unclear pis aller, summoned to chase in reverberative terms what has failed to take place. As Trains refers to a bitter season and a world ‘profondément gelé’ where little or nothing ‘gives’, might one speak of a ‘bitter inbetween-ness’ spasmodically taking hold of Bancquart’s poetry? One reads in Curriculum vitae (OO, pp.57-58), as if it were part of the discipline of life: Je touche l’amertume de notre place entre les objets trouvés du dedans et ceux que le dehors impose à notre incertitude.

It is a stark fragment showing existence painfully astride the divide: measuring the discrepancy between objects within (if they can be so called, for they are objects lost and found, mere waifs and strays, having just an accidental security) and objects of the outside world (which enjoy a ‘thereness’, a ‘certainty’ and a belonging). Paroles du monde, focussing on the interplay of one’s own writings and a cosmic ‘speech’, reinforces the issue: Exhortation massive des choses: ne demeure pas dans le froissement de ta peau (OO, p.35).

7

Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, p.38.

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In Trains that ‘exhortation’ is there from the outset, but sparsely, seemingly to no avail. It ‘urges one out’, gesturing across the frontier. One imagines, however, that the vehicle swishing past, not unlike the ‘froissement de ta peau’, fails to catch and ‘take on board’ that twinned message, challenging one’s defensive epiderm and the sheen of the ‘vitre’, of snow reaching to infinity and tree aiming at the sky. The avidity of the tree, uncompromising and ‘total’ despite its transient passage, and miming (thanks to inversion of verb and subject) a surprise attack sprung on that glass partition, has a special contribution to make, not only to the evolution of this text, but in the dynamics of the collection. It is a key word: choses dans une avidité majeure de nous un peu dehors bosselant sur l’axe du monde petits d’espace dans nos corps ensachés (OO, p.19)

It is as if the world of things, voiceless and voracious, reached out with its contradiction and refreshment, eating at the edge, puzzled by our stitched-in fate, our condition as a small protuberance on the great mobile axis of the world. The coming together has little in common with the transcendent euphoria infusing Romantic pantheism. It is, rather, a knocking at the gates, a tremor between enclosure and the breach, a sapping reminder that one is not safe in one’s frontiers. ‘La présence / peut être mangé’: subject to the teeth-marks of a violation. It is a ‘break-through’, however, which highlights the tensions of the outer-inner division (as the alternating syntax of further lines in the same text, expanding and contracting, might indicate): le poirier ses hardes blanches par terre une année de plus.

Be it the apple-tree in a seasonal cloak of white blossom or pear-tree having shed white rags at its base, the effect is similar: to prove our apartness, our inability to respond in kind, to translate the blank and embroider the whiteness. The nudity of formulation of the following extract accentuates the edges of confrontation:

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Chose hors du je comme la pierre et l’arbre (OO, p.23).

The untenable pressure of the outstretched communication of things, the torture of the threshold, tightens at unpredictable instants. Like the tree which eats at glass and attracts through screens, there is this flower, a signal needing no verb other than the force of its own presence: La fleur dans des vitres si fort qu’elle transforme reflet et sang vers son pétale (OO, p.62)

Rooted in the earth, it joins pear-tree and apple-tree in telegraphing its message of lost sources: ‘toutes les origines envahissent la chambre’ (OO, p.88). In Trains, however, that ‘towards’, the transformational dynamism seeking to pierce vitreous partitions, is checked. The train moves, but nothing budges. It devours distances, but gains little sustenance. It may be that the growth-tangle of the tree and that of human life are in some way complementary, twinned as one lifepattern, but do they achieve mutual support? There may be only the slightest difference, as words and function, between ‘branches’ and ‘bronches’, both being respiratory systems with a lattice-work of alveolae and capillaries, but one is extravert and the other an introvert, and the efforts of poetry (linguistic secretions exuded towards the world) to span the gap – which a moment’s mishearing, a vowel inflexion or a slip of the tongue might encourage – result only in the laboured soldering of a conjectural relationship (or the vocalic illusion of one) from a position of captivity: régime qu’on suivrait pour écrire en captivité de soi le rapport tout de même entre l’arbre et les bronches (OO, p.80).

It is a ‘rapport’ further perturbed by the paradoxes of movement: Ton morceau de route est seul dans la forêt qui marche pour son compte (OO, p.41).

It is not just that, inside the object in motion, the traveller seems to be motionless, while the fixed thing appears to go galloping past. They

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also pull against each other in another sense, in that the train journey is in segments and compartments: boxes inside a wider mobility and a vaster notion of time and space to which forests, despite their rootedness, pertain. Where is the common cause? Can it be re-established? In the interim the speaker simply records: Je suis dans cette plaine en voiture (OO, p.31).

The act of eating may be more a sign of emptiness than fulfilment in Bancquart’s work. It can be bleak, appetite in the void, a voracious sensual gesture for little return. One reads: ‘L’hiver mange un grand pain de plaine sur la ville’ (OO, p.122). Here the ‘grazing’ is an eroding cold roaming the wastes, a ‘nourishment’ on the loose apart from the enclaves of human life, in a decor akin to the ‘grande neige’ outside the window-pane. The same poem continues, ‘L’herbe de jadis est froide’. Does this give a key to the patterning: that the supple greens of the landscape of youth has been overtaken by an inflexible winter of the soul? Even when roles are switched and it is the human habitat (refuge of the ‘homme assis’) which extends its reach, the result is the same. It meets rejection, solitude and the frustration of nibbling at frontiers, in that thin band of ‘eating between’ which may be all that an inhospitable earth has on offer: Ayant jugé la mince hospitalité de la terre un village très seul mange sa lande (OO, p.73).

The imagery of the isolated enclave defines Trains. It supports what Michaux calls ‘l’odieux compartimentage du monde’8. For, not only is one dealing with frozen relationships in the vision of ‘un monde profondément gelé’ layer upon layer (as the burrowing sound of ‘monde / profondément…’ vaguely suggests), of a permafrost by which roots are clenched and water hardened; but also with a motif of capsules inside other capsules, in a tightening mise en abyme: the space of the railway compartment locked inside the ‘hiérarchie’ or stratified order of the earth, which is in turn a sealed form within the rotations of planets depicted, too, as ‘solidifiées’, congealed though in motion. The syntax of this section appears also ‘congealed’. As it 8

Plume, p.70.

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reaches down, verbless, in truncated grammatical segments, it adds its reflection of the unyielding order of the world. ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’9, writes Shakespeare. Is the ‘winter’ the freezing-out of poetry? As one reads in Sans lieu sinon l’attente: Les mots font mal à notre gorge. On les remplace par l’ordre du désert creusé de marches qui durcirent….(SL, p.80).

What one can say with some certainty is that, even at the heart of that tight enclosure (broken by the only commas of the poem, signs of both partition and permeability), there is a semblance of a ‘soft centre’ in the form of ‘Des souvenirs, des ombres sur le train’. These are the lurking companions of human life, impalpable visitors in transit, the presences of no contour which drift at margins and over boundaries. They are the agents of a restlessness on the face of the journeying, a penumbra of disquiet against the uniformity of white. (Does the assonance of ‘homme’ and ‘ombre’ give a darkish echo, like a heartmurmur among the ‘planètes solidifiées’ and in the ‘silence de ces espaces infinis’?) Whatever the answer, shadows and memories wafting through the grid of one’s travelling consciousness are given no licence in the plummeting temperatures of the ‘deep freeze’. They fail to materialize from the wings. They make no mark against an inflexibility which, line by line, neutralizes suggestiveness and inflicts stasis on the hoverings of the inexplicit and their thin reminder of other aspirations. The opposition of inner and outer worlds could hardly be more chilling. Words themselves are shrunk to the minimum. Does nothing grow, despite a single tree’s expansive lunge, in this hostility? ‘Dedans’ and ‘dehors’ seem born from the same meagre mould as the solitary word ‘Seule’, the ‘source’ of the poem: Dedans dehors multiples de cristaux.

9

King Richard the Third, Act 1, Scene 1, line 1.

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Despite a lack of descriptive ‘flesh’, however, outside and inside are not the terms of abstract antithesis. In their description as ‘multiples de cristaux’, they take on body. As metabolic formations, they imply a chemistry of self in the universe, even if presently in a state of cryogenic arrest. They draw attention to the interplay of solids and non-solids, crucial to the text as a whole. What has happened, for instance, to that liquid opaqueness, vital to one’s shadowy identity, which floods the statement: ‘Moi, le sang illisible’(OO, p.62)? Or to the spongy cellular mass within the breathing being which ensures its survival, described elsewhere (with the same echo on ‘branches’) as – Crépu des bronches personnage à lui seul dans le centre de nous (OO, p.30)?

How compatible, indeed, is that ‘messiness’ of the interior with the matter of the world? For, even if one perceives resemblances between that frizzy density swelling and contracting and the close-knit motions of a tree, or between one’s circulating dark fluid and life-assuring sap, can one really come to terms with either? Another text from Opportunité des oiseaux provokes just such a bout of questioning: Une gelée de groseilles blanches infiniment redivisée Si c’était même distance au plus intime de nos sangs? si nous ne pouvions jamais entrer nulle part? (OO, p.24).

The extract shares with Trains the motif of whiteness. It is as if red cells had waned to leave a whitecurrant jelly, an anæmic purée within, the debilitating symptom of an in-between fate, where one is distanced from both ‘dedans’ and ‘dehors’, explained by neither. Does one assume that no reconciliation exists in such a poetic ice-age? For, if one reads the climactic lines (and future tenses) of the poem Toi (OO, p.102), Il fera toujours aurore et toujours faim devant l’inépuisable sélénite de la pâte

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transposée en cristal.

then the hardness of planets and formation of crystals do not necessarily signify exclusion and sterility. Might one not see, in the transposition in which the poem culminates, a ‘redemption’ of the murky ‘pâte’ into a luminous sharpness, even a hint of perennity? And if ‘dedans’ and ‘dehors’ clenched as one in this freeze are jointly ‘multiples de cristaux’, one might foresee a state where difference is annulled in something resembling Frénaud’s ‘identité de l’identité et de la non-identité’, where the white of ‘gelée de groseilles blanches’ is not irremediably at odds with that of ‘la hiérarchie d’un monde / profondément gelé’. As the earth turns, so does the poem. That isolated line, ‘La terre tourne avec ses planètes solidifiées’, is the text’s axis: eight lines precede it, eight lines follow. It is, to quote T.S.Eliot, ‘the still point of the turning world’10. (Is the human inner universe, still barely fathomable to science, the densest and most enigmatic of that world’s satellites?) Its slight tilt eases the poem, almost without one noticing, towards another ‘season’. Could it be that the composition of ‘dedans’ and ‘dehors’ as a double complex of ‘cristaux’ will bring them to share a thaw and melt together, in a way which firstly, in a universe of divisions and exile, seemed improbable, if not past human reach? This is a poetry concerned with breaking the ‘vitre’, with piercing the impenetrable crust. Hence this gesture in relation to the earth (and its one-word resistance): trésors de cette écorce que l’on casse indéfiniment: terre comme on crie Terre (OO, p.37).

As also this reference to the breaching of surfaces, to the lacune which cheats circumscription and the unity of the self-contained: Mais le trou dans la terre attend au premier plan (OO, p.49).

It is not just that the word ‘trou’ is due to make a reappearance in Trains, in ‘mènent boire […] dans les trous libres’, where the recog10

‘Burnt Norton’ in Four Quartets, The complete poems and plays, Faber, 1969, p.173.

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nition of apertures opening in the ice, coinciding with a new freedom of movement, is enlarged. For that tentative scenario has already been heralded by the hint of a returning sun. From the ‘symphonie en blanc majeur’11 of the snowy landscape and frozen cosmos, hard to the core and to the limits, one senses the emergence of a burning inner foyer: L’esprit couve et réfracte sa ténèbre en feu froid.

Perhaps embers of the human, as the roots of the physical world were gripped, were not wholly extinguished. In Choses, Bancquart poses the precarious, minimal question: Chaud noir au moins notre dedans? (OO, p.19).

Here, as if to reply, contrasts of ‘ténèbre’ and ‘feu’ make a comeback against the uniformity. A dormant volcano stirs. Ice, from some compacted inner furnace, reverts to water and fire. ‘Ombres’ and ‘souvenirs’, formerly wispy and ineffectual against the stiff dictatorship, now regather as a dense hearth (‘L’esprit couve sa ténèbre’, as if it were an ownership reclaimed), powering a project with purpose and direction (‘mènent boire les morts’, banished souls about to become flesh again). Just as the verb ‘couve’ implies expansion in potential, so ‘réfracte’ is a breaking of the straight line, a modifying of the angle of things, a bending of the inflexible. Indeed as the ‘thaw’ is promised, not only is there a modest flush of verbs, exhuming themselves from the verbless syntax of the first eight lines, but the stanzas themselves break into couplets (as a more airy ‘archipel’), with rhymes circulating between them (‘couve… loutres… trous’). It is tempting to see in this poem an answer, as a resurgence of ‘souvenir’ in congealing time, to the cry embodied (or embedded) in the sonnet by Mallarmé: Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!12 11 12

The title of a poem in Émaux et camées by Théophile Gautier. Œuvres complètes, pp.67-68.

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It is not the only time that one faces in Bancquart ‘cette blanche agonie / Par l’espace infligé à l’oiseau qui le nie. (One remembers that the volume from which Trains hails is Opportunité des oiseaux, and that the ‘melting’ converges with an instinct for flight.) Neige has the following opening setting, arguably even more listless and inert than that of Trains in that there is no velocity to score it and no passage: Un écœurement doux vient à mi-tronc d’arbres. Épuisement d’épines dans le blanc. Épuisement des os, parmi le sang fatigué de décembre (OO, p.111).

The mind reaches, however, for the warmth of an inner salvation: Mais la neige, on ne l’aime pas […] On préfère regarder une orange, dans une chambre en ville, jusqu’à ce que sa forme demeure sous les paupières fermées.

That image of red roundness countering the cold, stored like an inner sun, recurs in the collection: ‘La neige parle doucement au vernis des tomates’ (OO, p.123). If a fire burns (however darkly, however coldly), then liquid will find routes. A ‘monde profondément gelé’ reveals, despite its worst intentions, a crop of water-holes. Water runs in deep patterns through Bancquart’s imaginaire. In the present instance, it coincides with a newly emergent sense of quest (more mysterious than any train journey) and possibilities of access. It releases into the poem a scent of refreshment. Scents of the kind infiltrate neighbouring texts. In Secret (OO, p.94) where, in a central line, ‘L’ellébore crie sa pourpre au milieu du ciel de décembre’ (the visualisation of a ‘fête constante’ asserted within the terrible ‘usure constante’), this finale, born of that cry, takes flight: Odeur de la rivière de la source en rivière et dans la source d’un point secret et plus humide.

At another time, it is the first line which is snatched by the fragrance of a downpour, a sensation not easily pacified which prompts the text: ‘Odeur irritée du cassis sous l’averse’ (OO, p.120). Suggesting a kind

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of break-through from world to word, it is also a sign of a surprised poetic self discovering itself as ‘hybride entre océan et l’homme’ (OO, p.123). The word ‘source’ is important. In Mage, one reads of Le printemps à la main avec bâton mauve d’une fontaine à l’autre (OO, p.62).

Is the ‘loutre’, leading a way from death to life, a kind of ‘sourcier’, a mage of nature, divining springs (in both senses of the word) for those more radically consigned to earth? Elsewhere, it is the adjective ‘artésien’ which taps those sources, drawn from afar to irrigate the profondeurs of language yet keeping silence: Une douceur d’iris et de bestiaux jaillit tellement artésienne qu’elle aussi se tait dans les mots (OO, p.113).

It is hard to know in Trains, amidst the ‘racines serrées’ and ‘eau sèche’, from what levels that water has welled. But it brings a softness and relief, a sustenance and sweetness of being in the unyielding harshness. It is a proof, amazingly re-established, that Il y a cette douceur en nous que rien ne justifie dans l’immense caillot du monde (OO, p.124).

The source whispers also of the sea. It may be but a trickle, but it is movement towards, alpha communing with omega, if only in stutters towards its unveiling. In Voyages (OO, pp.30-32) one couplet stands out in italics, as if derived from a voice or ‘source’ resounding differently from habitual ones: Au moins une voix de quelqu’un reprenant la mer.

Is the ‘loutre’ such a voice, silent as it sidles instinctively towards water while mediating the release of the poet as distant disciple? Perhaps, as suggested, the nascent break-up of the last five lines of the poem into looser, freer-floating islets betokens anticipation of the seas once more. ‘L’eau courante nourrit des allusions aux îles’ (OO, p.63),

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says a line from Mage. And the poem Fin (OO, p.101) shapes this wish for a reversal of the world: Escomptant la saison des doutes quand le lait sera pâle j’espère pour notre peau la reversion des îles du dehors en nous.

As in Trains, a bloodless ‘saison des doutes’ breeds the urge (warmed in the one-word hearth which is hope) for an inner ‘aeration’, a kind of archipelago through which to travel in a cellular space. Might it be a return to the amniotic state before the congealing of the species, to the dream of being ‘un-born’ and cleansed as a creature of water (like the ‘loutre’) in a ceremony devoid of all pretention: Rêve de dé-naissance qui renverserait notre corps […] Rêve de grottes nettoyées […] Lessivage de nous (OO, p.25)?

The first section of Opportunité des oiseaux is Journal des eaux. It is a title committed to the writing of water, to the intertwining of text and elements over a span of time. It is not always an easy partnership. Hence the number of texts where contact with the liquid force is made only finally, after successive ‘entries’ consigned to the page. It may be less ‘le déluge du cosmos’ (OO, p.11) than a lock-gate, a tight premonition of fluidities. But it does allow the poet who admits Moi c’est la liquidation que je désire C’est l’eau sourde Comme si le verre Se mettait au dégel (MA, p.141),

to ascertain with some reassurance: Et la pluie existe aussi bien dans la terre (OO, p.20).

So, the finale of Trains is not only a ‘liquidation’ by its inlet of waterimagery, where ‘boire’ comes to assuage the totalitarianism of ‘eau sèche’. It represents also a more radical ‘fluidification’ of the poem

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itself, slowly saved from its own deep freeze and mortal stiffness. Though not written in formal alexandrines but in truncated segments of lesser grandeur, it does ultimately, by the tentative undoing of its own strictures of form, echo the process evoked in the last lines of Portrait de Jonas avec femme (OO, pp.11-16). It is ‘comme un désespoir en alexandrins […] qui finirait en fleuve’, finding flexibility and movement where were only divisions and solid blocks. The apparition of ‘loutres’ as intercessors, supple watercreatures rolling and rippling with invisible currents, has a prime value. Ancêtres, ruines, rêves (OO, pp.54-56) includes the lines (in the Past Historic, as if the celebrations referred to were of a former age): Il y eut des folies d’abreuvoir et de bêtes.

The entry of otters to guide the way is a prelude to such quenching fervour. It restores the prospect of re-entry to a lost world. It is no accident that ‘loutre’ tallies with ‘l’outre’, a skin bag swollen with liquid used as a drinking vessel. It is as if, touched by the wand of sound, the vision were made reversible: from creature of fur contained within water to a furry container replete with water. So, indissociably, the one word is both ‘abreuvoir’ and ‘bête’. Is this why a text from Mémoire d’abolie invokes ‘de grands animaux amphibies […] sous les racines’ (MA, p.118), at ease in two elements, leading a double life and making transitions naturally (as does the ‘loutre’ between the dead and the living)? The otter visits the poem like an ‘ancêtre’ from the strata, purveyor of an élan vital.from underground. Hence its affinity to the dead in their retreat, and its concern for their refreshment and survival. The last words of Insomnies are: On pousserait le sang On bousculerait la parole Pour trouver une seule bête à qui se fier (MA, p.107).

In one simple but magical switch of a word, the poet of Trains has found just such an animal, via which errant ‘ombres’, entrusting themselves to its guidance, now find direction. The ‘loutre’ is, by association, a sensual animal: silky and sleek in its well-lubricated movements. It introduces at this point, not only vitality and motion, but an influx of sensuality, a tactile charm, into a desensitized landscape. In a wintry universe, Bancquart voices

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her ‘gratitude pour le velu’ (OO, p.118). The windowless writer in Déni (OO, pp.33-34), locked between walls, shows a will to persevere with the painful alchemy of poetry towards the ‘manna’ of sensual abundance: Je travaille pourtant au renversement de l’énigme: le monde envahissant mon corps avec des cageots qui déversent les feuilles fraîcheur velue… .

In Trains, too, there has been, by a process and at a juncture difficult to determine, a ‘renversement de l’énigme’. The world has released an envoy to break partitions and touch the body with its ‘fraîcheur velue’. The velvety pile of animal skin is an antidote to the vitre’s surface which allows no purchase and, though transparent, cuts one off as surely as a guillotine-blade. Its texture slips past one’s own epiderm to give it a second skin, and restore a half-belief in purpose. One reads: La dérision n’est pas certaine. On en doute au pelage des bêtes (OO, p.64).

If the numbing cold of the universe, refusing admission, was a form of ‘derision’, a cosmic taunting, then the ‘loutres’ bring the flesh of truth to bear on the equation, the undeniable nearness of warm-blooded surfaces in contact. And if, in the poetic dialectic of Opportunité des oiseaux, one section is called Exils and the next one Inclusions, then that fluid sensuality, irrigating the earth, is the agent of passage from one to the other. The dormouse is a similar visitor, running its softness over the hard: Il passe des loirs sur les pierres. On se tait enfin. Alors la nudité superbe de l’amour trouve du répondant aux souches (OO, p.42).

It opens vertical resonances between love (released with the purity of water?) and the sullenness of tree-roots (an ancestry now finding voice?). It also opens the way to silence, to a point where language,

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with its probing pretentions, can fall quiet and absorb the unspoken vitality of the world with which it joins. Arbre (MA, p.159) begins: L’arbre C’est pour mieux transférer une jeunesse de la terre.

The avid signalling of the tree at the start of Trains, though part of the ‘exhortation massive des choses’ (OO, p.35), was not sufficient at the time or in itself to make the break-through. It has taken a conjunction of earth, fire and water, of vegetable, mineral and animal, of inanimate and animate, to stir the waters and for the ‘loutres’ finally to lead the crusade towards a precarious liberty of manœuvre. ‘Je travaille pourtant au renversement de l’énigme’. So many poems of Marie-Claire Bancquart do so in their evolutionary course. We have seen the central line of this text, ‘La terre tourne avec ses planètes solidifiées’, as a textual turning-point tilting the reader towards a reweighting of the equation. One could speak, not only of a deviation of line, but of a quietly heralded metamorphosis: ‘réfracte sa ténèbre en feu froid’. Or equally of a tentative resurrection. ‘On renaîtrait un peu’ (OO, p.78) are the final liminal words of Rêve: a conjecture which the finale of Trains and its ‘movement elsewhere’ obliquely reflects. Taking on water from an uncertain source, it is a text ‘[qui] finit par se réenfanter’ (OO, p.119). Nor is it fanciful to suggest a transubstantiation. For in joining forces with ‘loutres’, it is as if one were relinquishing a primary human identity to become more fluently a creature of the elements, in the direction sketched in Rêve: On serait verdure en forme d’homme – secondairement (OO, p.78).

The anthropocentric fixity of the ‘homme assis’ is destabilized by the saps of other circuits of life (another network of lines). And it is a leaning acquiescence to the message of trees which enables the switching of points: Cela titubera devant les arbres pour joindre un réseau majeur de ce monde (OO, p.16).

In this crossing to ‘une autre rive de la vie’ (OO, p.79), the ‘loutres’ are instruments of passage, passeurs like Charon, but in reverse: not

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bound inexorably for Hades but bringing the dead from their chilled underworld towards the ‘springs’ of life. The poem therefore represents a prescience of the rebirth from the dead. It is an unsealing of the tomb in that the domineering hierarchy of the world, including that which divides the dead from the living, is transgressed. In La mort habite (OO, p.82), those very words, ‘la mort habite’, shriek out independently, reflexively, from the body of the text: a strident reminder that death has a living-place, its own living place whence its voice stakes a claim on our world and more especially on the echochamber which is the poem. The troubling maxim prompts this recognition: Très proches les défunts d’hier: on va passer de leur côté.

Whether one goes towards them or they move towards us is not at issue. It is the two-way movement which is essential. For that sinuous pilgrimage towards ‘trous libres’, if it is an exit from the underground, is also an entry by now-available passages into the pages of a poem, so representing communications established in their direction by the writer herself. The ‘trous libres’ are, therefore, the holes in the ground made for survival, ice-holes such as might nourish arctic peoples ‘in the bleak midwinter’, and the apertures of poetry, whose mission it is to liberate from the coldly inexpressive. Paroles des morts (OO, p.90), assuming the voice of the dead (and so a verbal leap beyond by the writer and a change of side), illustrates in its two paragraphs a before and an after, life before and life after death, the latter voiced thus: N’importe: libérés, on est mieux. On roule sans essence, on s’arrache des plaquettes de poèmes, on se tait comme des graines. Ces fêtes nous sont prêtées par nos successeurs. À leur tour sous l’occupation de la vie, c’est avec douceur qu’ils nous offrent (du fond de leur doute) leurs impossibles.

The incipient freeing of the dead and the journey towards refreshment in Trains is not simply provided by the ‘loutres’ but, in a real sense, by that living successor who is the poet, who gives them room between the lines and aerates her text. It is seen as a reciprocal need. On the one hand, the dead seem to snatch at books of poetry for moments of celebration, borrowed fervour and exaltation. On the other, the living look to the dead from their own uncertain depths, and

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proffer towards them, perhaps as wiser counsellers who have now crossed boundaries and seen both sides, all that is blocked and arrested, contradictory and unresolved, in the opaqueness of the condition humaine. Seen in the light of this extract, the mobilization of the dead in the penultimate stage of Trains is an eleventh-hour release from deathliness by and for the poet, now able (against previous expectations) to transfer in a yielding moment her ‘impossibles’ to this mysterious but therapeutic companionship of the other side. Another text ends: C’est tout petit notre habitation du désir c’est plein de morts c’est tout le précieux de ce monde (OO, p.89).

Is the last couplet therefore the container or ‘chamber’ of all that is most precious, and a paradoxical proof, against all doubt, that it remains alive and well? For to access the dead is to find channels to unblock the mortified. A final light comes from Métamorphoses (OO, pp.120-21). ‘Populated’ by an enigmatic ‘Elle’ subject to unstoppable transmigrations, it touches the issues of self, identity and belonging: Elle a mangé l’euphorbe et le laurier-rose, elle est passée à l’envers. Elle est morte. Personne ne la voit. Mais le bois a gardé son odeur, les chambres attendent toujours […] De quelle mort? Un autre explore en nous, très lentement. […] Nous éclaterons.

Here, too, there is a passing over from one sphere to the next and displacement of the dead. It is a question, too, of eating the growth of nature (or being eaten by it as in ‘que mange un arbre au passage’) in an exchange involving a ‘death’ of the self: a death, however, not as definitive as one might think, which defies its own terms. For nothing seems ready to accept confinement (‘les chambres attendent toujours’), and the roaming scent of what has been absorbed overleaps distances, perseveres and refuses to be quelled. There is, moreover, a subterranean force, possibly akin to the intervention of the ‘loutres’, not necessarily quick to work changes but moving in mysterious ways. With it comes a prospect of release (‘Nous éclaterons’), just as Trains beckons towards ‘les trous libres’, holes described elsewhere as ‘trous

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d’anamorphose’ (OO, p.75): that is, for seeing things ‘otherwise’, in changed proportions, in a new equilibrium of horizontal and vertical. The resurrection of the dead is inseparable from that of poetry. In the ultimate poem of the collection, the question surfaces: Peut-être honore-t-on là-bas notre contrat de bête comme nous songeons au poète seul sous la terre avec sa chair terriblement végétale avec ses mots durcis dans notre bouche? (OO, p.125).

From ‘poète seul sous la terre’ and ‘mots durcis dans notre bouche’ (echoed in Trains by ‘serre les racines’), one slips towards liquid movements affecting, with other things, the blocks of the poem’s form. Does one also sense the release of a scent of music? For a fine chain of fricatives (‘réfracte… en feu froid’) is breathed into the text to coincide with a bending of the authority of lines; and a ripple of assonance (‘couve… loutres… trous’) finds freedom, all the more convincingly in that ‘loutres’ and ‘trous libres’ create a perfect anagram, as if part of a permutation in progress or resurrection by sound. The essential significance of a Bancquart poem may rest, not in thematic statement, but in unobtrusive modifications of rhythm, a changed note, a musical shift, a new instrument joining the concert. They alone may be the sign of the poem’s progress and its modest achievement. So, the first text of the section Habitations ends with the secretive conclusion: Comme une altération de la musique qui serait le souverain chant elle avance un peu vers son vrai (OO, p.87).

‘Avancer vers…’ is the penultimate note of Trains. A halfhidden musical shift, almost ‘insaisissable’, points the text in a new direction. As if prompted by the verb ‘réfracte’, it introduces a leaning from the dictatorship of the centre. The poem Cherchant (OO, p.29), beginning with the verb ‘Tu cherches…’, concludes with the line: ‘Tu trouves seulement cette dérive du désir’. That is what Trains finds in its quest and no more: a drift of desire which is the total, if unfinished, justification of the poem. One reads nearby:

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Here, too, the text drifts towards the edge of things, not least its own edge: a potential outlaw to the determinism of words. If one asks to where that movement towards refreshment and freedom leads, the answer is to the adjective ‘proche’. Perhaps no greater degree of liberation exists. The poem, at that point, has gained leeway, acquired the capacity to reach beyond, given itself licence to believe in the imminence of ‘somewhere else’. It has moved, in its difficult course, from ‘Seule’ to seuil. It has earned a ‘plus tard’, in the sense suggested in the final words of L’amoureuse: Plus tard passage du désir

(OO, p.103).

The poem, then, is not so much the consummation of desire as a preparation of the conditions for passage: for arrival and departure beyond the text and its visible frame. Numerous examples conspire, in last paragraphs, to confirm the same truth. The ‘last word’ of Limite (MA, p.117) is: tâche vers une fraction de seconde qui prophétiserait passage.

Reflux (OO, p.116) moves also to the fringe of an anticipated opening, where it rests: ‘Attendant une ouverture proche’. And Ville (MA, p.139) finds its way through a ‘tissu d’impasses’ to a point where an infinitely expanded space looms large: tu crèves l’autre espace. Surtout vers le fond; la mer pas si lointaine… .

‘L’insaisissable est proche’: the influx of promise is, one might argue, the sign of the reawakening of the tensions of paradox. This is apparent in the juxtaposition of ‘ténèbre’ and ‘feu’ suddenly harnessed as part of the same process, in a two-way transition between death-in-life and life-in-death, and between horizontals and verticals. It reaches its supreme expression in that simultaneity of the close and the distant, of what is so near at hand that it is a sensual presence and so evasive that it will never be retained or known. It is with that concert of opposites, poised in equilibrium at the very last, that the

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uniformity of white, the monotonous and the monochrome, are quietly though triumphantly overstepped. The ‘monde profondé-ment gelé’ is made to ‘give’, showing the faint outlines of an alternative face, closer perhaps to childhood: En rose ardent le monde promettait superbe essorage de tout le gris d’adulte (OO, p.30).

OPÉRA DES LIMITES

(1988)

Suite au dieu-lune I Cendres sur la face la lune étale au ciel les mystérieux suçons du destin que nous sentons à notre peau le soir ayant déposé notre habit de souffles pour être seuls dans une pièce à double rideaux. Nous répétons alors des gestes si anciens qu’ils sont hors de l’histoire et marchent dans la chair de notre espèce comme les bêtes près de nous marchent dans les fibres des meubles.

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Le temps échappe aux montres. Sous elles où bat visiblement le sang compulsé par le cœur un doigt se pose. Nous finissons toujours par écarter les étoffes. Notre figure un peu reflétée dans la vitre dit allégeance aux millénaires.

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II Au crépuscule se lève une incarnation de notre impalpable emblavure au monde. Abolie la distance entre nuage et nous. L’intimité du sang avec la sève se tisse à la lueur des meubles. Notre corps la fleur et le dieu tout est compact.

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III Dieu-lune enveloppant de vent les hautes branches attire un corps dans la rue verte du sommeil. Des choses bougent imperceptiblement et nous soulagent d’être cette chair toute seule qu’une force remue par le dedans. Une patte d’étrange s’engage à travers les volets.

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IV Lune? Son visage est marqué par tumulte et pulsation fragile. Elle participe au genre d’homme et de femme. Nos yeux ouverts à l’intérieur de nous sous les paupières endormies suivent le cours de sa cueillaison: langue gorge et notre petite mœlle de vertébré. Nos yeux ouverts épient sur le trajet des nerfs.

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V Notre vie proche d’autres vies notre idée que l’amour est de la partie? C’est en fragments si minces dans les livres les courses les bonjours les jardins le sommeil qu’il faut assurer: j’aime pour se persuader que l’ombre malheureuse ne nous mange pas tout entiers nous qui mangeons des bêtes apprêtées sans yeux ni poils pour ne pas voir le meurtre encastré dans l’amour. Une lumière au ciel c’est un astre mort depuis mille siècles. Nous aussi sur d’autres planètes nous sommes morts. Amours délices de repas c’étaient nos rayons en survie pour des regards inattentifs et rares.

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VI Une interférence du vent rafraîchit la lune près de ce visage étranger naguère, maintenant proche pathétiquement, jamais tien, baisé en rêve. Jamais confondu, jamais plus hors de toi. Un glaçon dans les flammes. Vent et visage à peine possédés présents à la fenêtre fraîche. La nuit fait semblant de mourir. C’est toujours la longue intimité d’anis dans ta chair passagère.

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VII Les chers défunts prennent subitement connaissance de leur beauté. Ce lambeau très lent, brume sur lune, leur est affecté pour se vêtir d’un sang plus spacieux que naguère. Ils enveloppent le coudrier, l’iris, l’indigence diurne des vivants. La terre tourne sa peau. Les chiens ne font plus peur à ces aveugles en nous qui rejoignent chaque nuit la musique.

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VIII Nous avons avalé ton marais d’ombre comme à travers la gorge des grands maudits la couleuvre se faufile vers un ciel brûlé. Le noir n’est pas absolu cependant. Tu avances avec la lueur d’ardoise dont brillent les monnaies dans les anciens tableaux. Tu annonces le trottoir d’adieu momentané quand il a plu sous les fenêtres et que ton œil au bord du square évoque la mer.

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IX Il est des yeux pour qui les cerises ne sont jamais mûres des yeux qui ne voient pas le vert qui vivent d’éternel automne. Pourtant l’imperfection se tisse d’une douceur qui va de mer au ciel. Très rares les aveugles au bleu. Comme si flux reflux laissaient intervalle habitable dans la réserve du dieu-lune.

The work of Marie-Claire Bancquart is traversed by precarious gods. They are the gods of pre-history, half-buried, calling from afar, pre-dating any unitarian God who might claim to transcend or oust them, imposing exclusion orders and hierarchies of spiritual superiority. ‘Dieu n’avait pas chassé d’autres dieux de mon cœur’ (OO, p.31), says the speaker of Voyages. Between truth and falsity, in the darker hinterland of the reasoning self, they work their influence, manipulating parts of our nature whose roots go beyond analysis. In the ‘disequilibrium’ of world and self, amidst all that wrong-foots us and confuses equations as it filters through the sponge of experience, the question arises: ‘S’ils étaient vrais, pourtant, les dieux, ces grands chevaux de notre usure?’ (OL, p.15). Though one may waver between connection and disconnection, belief and non-belief, allegiance and exile, and lapse into negligence, one cannot quite manage to cast them off. How does one interpret those ‘grands chevaux’? We keep using them for our (often unacknowledged) purposes, in which sense they are our work-horses, easing the otherwise excessively heavy labour of life; but, conversely, they wear us out, as we plough a lonely furrow to the grave while they go on forever. Hence the energy surging from the statue of an ancient god, with no visible remains of a temple, in Tarente (OL, pp.36-37): Il parvient à son ancien règne dans une part de nous que ses yeux de marbre éclairent étrangement comme les paupières d’Orphée mort. Sous le regard de pierre ce dormeur en nous se lève et titube vers des feuillages enterrés devant dieu sismographe.

It is the sleeper in the self which is pricked to life across time and space by that impenetrable look. It staggers forwards like a somnambulist. In the innermost core, we become passageways for an underground upheaval, for tremors in some god-like body, drawing us from our comfortable humus into a vaster fermentation.

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The imaginative slippage between gods and moons is a fluent one, as the title Suite au dieu-lune indicates. It is a short step from the quotation just given to the evocation of the moon and its ‘regard de pierre’ cast on the sleeping self. Indeed, it is the shedding of God as a single entity which clears the way for uprising ‘divinities’ of a much more dubious hue. Voyages (OO, p.32) veers, in its final stages, towards a landscape haunted by a paradoxical absence, where the deathly combination of moon and rock assume an eerie new glow through the sieve of human blood, lit and veiled at the same time: Je ne me souciais pas de Dieu qui fait briller terriblement par son absence ce soir au voile rouge de mon sang la lune et les rochers.

The god that invites only to vanish is also the subject of Mer (OL, p.12), where a withdrawal of the sea, closing back over its own secrecy, draws this leap of association: et nous pensions au dieu seule convoitise des émigrants qui menait l’exode au désert jusqu’au pays où il se dissimula pour toujours derrière un voile qui finit par faire douter de l’énigme.

Moon is not mentioned as such, but one can call up its emblem over this cosmic wasteland between illumination and obscurity, where a pallid body, itself homeless, is trailed perpetually across the sky, vanishing behind veils, waxing and waning, tracing a fuller and fuller itinerary only to be obliterated. Does it slide easily, as substitute celestial guide and more recognisable mirror of the fate of emigrants, into that bereavement of the missing god? Is it, as half-luminous asteroid in the void, one of those retentive fragments to which the visitor, or poet seeking to articulate, can cling for want of firmer beliefs: Le visiteur épelle ces fragments fragilement inclus dans l’orphelinat des croyances (OL, p.11)?

For the moon, like Sisyphus always approaching but doomed to selfrepetition, has its own intermediate life of fullness and fragment, constancy and variability, integration and exile. The poem goes on,

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still referring to that voice in transit faced with floating remnants in an otherwise deserted universe: Il aimerait emménager en eux devenir un pays avec sa longitude où se dresse Lazare d’une mort à l’autre jusqu’à la fin des temps.

Lazarus and the moon are cousins: treading the boundaries between death and resurrection, in timeless transition between life-in-death and death-in-life. Orpheus, in his quest to retrieve Eurydice, ventures into a similar zone, scouring the half-light amidst stony landscapes which one hopes to convert into a place less alien: Mon voyage a ce commencement mystérieux des paysages sans oiseaux habités de présences blanches. Venus de mes ténèbres germinatives moulés sur mémoire blessée vous êtes les menhirs d’une civilisation qui aurait perdu le soleil. Et je vous interroge au ventre du château d’énigme solitaire parmi vos faces avec mes viscères et l’haleine tiède de mes paroles (OL, p.16).

The moon, a sculpted stone in space, forms the perfect icon of ‘une civilisation qui aurait perdu le soleil’: a wan light reflecting the sun in its absence, a ‘présence blanche’, itself a ghost of the poet with her warmish breath of expression, stranded inside but emitted beyond, as she stands ‘solitaire parmi vos faces’. The moon passes in fitful phases through Bancquart’s cloudstrewn work. Just as it moves tides and the urges of madmen, so, translated across space, it revolves like a white corpuscle at the visceral heart of the human: within those susceptible ‘Corps minés par le mal de lune’ (SL, p.89). Its blanched light is a medium for the anguish of the ‘in-between’. Hence the poem entitled Pâle, with its advent of star-struck travellers and starkness of celestial eyes: Des cavaliers constellés d’yeux regardent l’obscurité d’une chambre où l’homme pleurant son propre corps

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In the flesh of the text tâte la torture du Christ. Laitance de douleur (SL, p.117).

Or the piece called Blanc (SL, p.92), where the darkness of human compartments is again penetrated by a quasi-religious white, coming to erase the world and effect a partial cleansing: Dévoration des maisons par les ombres. Naissance d’un pays salé, comme les tours du Sacré-Cœur sous la lune. Un blanc du monde.

It is a whiteness propitious to a shift from deathliness to birth, from squat darkness to an upsurge of purity. It becomes therefore the appropriate gift – directed from wishful communicator to parted addressee when other words fail – for ‘un ami mort’: C’est un étranger très étrange. On voudrait lui donner la lune et lui faire comprendre tout doucement qu’il faut partir avec (OO, p.51).

This is a poetry which could adopt, in distinctive ways, Michaux’s statement: ‘La grande partie de ma vie, je l’aurai vécue comme une galaxie’1. In Dormeuse (OO, p.59) Bancquart, envisaging torture between body and stars and a self configured in a new space, speculates La femme que j’invente en moi souffre peut-être entre mon corps et la galaxie.

The first words of Voyages (OO, p.30), linking the human heart in its firmament and a planet (a disenfranchised lunar replica) revolving in a far-flung system of life-signals, are: Cœur?  En exil comme une planète.

1

Passages, Gallimard, 1963, p.81.

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That such inter-planetary displacement involves, not just a requestioning of one’s function and identity, but also a problematization of language, itself threatened by alternative selves and prone to tides of deadness and revival, emerges from this defiant confrontation: Notre corps à corps […] finit par faire une planète obscure où la parole s’amortissait (OO, p.72).

To be half-elsewhere, to be linked beyond, is a hazardous pursuit. And the voices deriving from it give few guarantees. As the ‘self-invented woman’ will discover, there is no insurance on moon-travel and no trustworthy fall-back position: Nous ne pouvons vous assurer contre la filiation lointaine disent les parents disparus. Nous ne couvrons pas les risques de lunes… (OO, p.54-55).

If, then, one locks in on Opéra des limites, the written universe in which Suite au dieu-lune finds its orbit, one detects a host of prevailing moon-signs. All testify to the mystery of ‘le ciel très vieux sur mon histoire obscure’ (OL, p.62), as if, cosmically, one were under layers of bed-clothes. It is such ‘overlaying’ which squeezes language into action: language in a state of un-resolve, between expression and silence, forced into unpredictable patterns that it fails to interpret. Does the title Seuls (OL, p.74), with its duality (or plurality) of solitudes, refer to the poet and some other unfathomed presence, or to the poet and her language as her dubious and quizzical proxy? The poem begins: Ici ta main dans le silence. Une inquiétude ancienne vit et se perd en nous…

and ends:

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In the flesh of the text Le soir médite au moins cette possession minime des choses.

The moon, as part of that ‘ciel très vieux’, is a similar ‘possession minime des choses’. The phrase ‘en nous’, suggesting a tricklingdown of the infinite into the human, turns into a title in its own right (OL, p.61). That text, too, begins with a silence advancing from elsewhere to occupy our space: Des choses de silence nous habitent.

Among those ‘things ineffable’ are not only ‘Des infidélités / des goûts de mort et d’abandon’, after-tastes or foretastes of what are no longer (or not yet) in our possession, but Aussi les dieux qu’une rencontre mince nous inspire plus qu’un menhir ou une église.

To what extent is the moon one of those ‘choses de silence’? Is it the ideal example, especially in its crescent form as finger-nail in the sky, of a ‘rencontre mince’ better able to breathe gods into us than any array of religious structures and sacred stones? Does it draw one more magnetically into night-time meditations on one’s ‘possession minime des choses’? The opener of Opéra des limites entitled D’homme (OL, pp.8-9), as if sketching from the start a tentative inventory of man’s ‘properties’, describes the landscape which confronts him in his ‘attente du bref éclair’ and thirst for refreshment: Pays sans compassion ni tort sérénissime.

The moon is a parallel. (In the flicker of an eye, ‘sérénissime’ blurs with ‘sélénissime’.) It is an absurdist heaven. It does not sympathize, show pity for or strike consoling communions with the human predicament. And if, on the other hand, it is remote and indifferent, there is no reason for it to be otherwise. It is irreproachably in order, giving no grounds for lament or revolt. One senses the passage in the same poetic sky of Baudelaire’s lunar goddess and the landscape into which, having rhythmically taunted the senses, she retreats,

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Opéra des limites Où tout n’est qu’or, acier, lumière et diamants, Resplendit à jamais, comme un astre inutile, La froide majesté de la femme stérile.2

Images of roundness, roundness which is the aspiration of the moon’s nature and its notional definition but from which it must lapse in spite of itself, slip across the face of the poet’s encounters. Does that ‘astre inutile’ equate to a pebble in space, a circumscribed form set against hollowness, a weight in the void counterbalancing the imperfections of earth whose movements do not enjoy the same serenity or perennity, as evoked in the following extract: Caillou Son calme différé pour un instant dans notre main. Après nous il sera là. Célébrera le frais emportement de notre terre dans l’espace qui n’aura plus ni sens ni courbe ni profondeur (OL, p.25)?

Conjuration (OL, p.83) implies that the answer is in the affirmative: Contre une expansion du grand creux je pose un bol de verveine sur la nappe […] Petit blason devant l’énigme.

For, here, the rounded form of the bowl, if not a perfect circle, is the poetic antidote to vertigo, a counter to the overspill of nothingness. It is a stabilizer and a form of ballast, just as the measured gesture accompanying it (‘je pose…’), like a phrase of poetry, brings composure (in two senses of the word) to bear on the threat of the uncircumscribable. Both bowl and moon, like a pairing of metaphor, might be seen as ‘petit blason devant l’énigme’. Though having the solidity of an everyday object, the bowl is anything but a ‘nature morte’. Elsewhere, it is the image of the egg which joins it. As in Souhait (OL, 2

Œuvres complètes, p.27.

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p.10) where a rounded form, like the full moon through a casement, materializes in the linear confines of the poet’s room, bringing relief from the Herculean task of writing and tracing a promise of rebirth: Et dans la chambre un œuf.

One might conceive of the moon equally as an island in the vastness, appealing no less to the need for containment, for sustainable contour, to hold against infinity and eternal motion. ‘Tout prenait acte, dans l’immobilité d’une île’ (OL, p.14), one reads: an oblique reflection of the textual project of Suite au dieu-lune, which takes place and finds ‘place’ (as focus in the unlimited) in that pallid circular demi-divinity cut loose on the ocean of the heavens. Can the moon, then, be thought of as ‘Notre île à la dérive’ (OL, p.24): the mirror, in an obscured age, of our threatened contour and tiny enclave, the agent provocateur of conjectures between measureless outer space and a no less immeasurable inner space, the whitish stepping-stone on which the mind can settle its weight in that ‘expansion du grand creux’? It may also be seen as a supernatural eye, not transparent and referring us back to ourselves, but symbolic of a temporal mystery yet to be revealed. An ‘œil secret’, therefore, which is perhaps the troubling precursor and accomplice of a more conclusive, apocalyptic one: Après le millénaire, viendra l’ange qui enveloppera notre terre dans un pétale aux douceurs de paupière, et donnera cet œil secret à la tendresse du prophète (OL, p.31).

If the image of a celestial eye is compelling, then so is that of the mouth. The conclusion of L’Autre (OL, p.58) calls, after a prolonged face à face across the distance, for a mutual devouring in these terms: Avale rond. Qu’il grossisse et mange ton cœur.

The words refer to the contour of an apple, to the hope that it will take one in as a roundness within a roundness. But the exhortation might apply to the moon, metaphysically more dubious but swallowed as a holy wafer to admit one in its circle and into a vaster universe. It is a similar image which closes the collection’s very first poem. Having stated, in recognition of a radical division of spaces, that ‘Notre

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espace / n’étoile pas le ciel’ (OL, p.9), the text records an existential shock ‘[qui] gifle le dehors le dedans’, an instant of confusion which bridges gaps, producing a finale which unites two roundnesses via that circular organ of passage (and of the articulation of poetry) which is the mouth. Ixion’s wheel, turning in the night sky, is a further parallel: D’autres condamnés rient sur les miniatures de la Bible pendant que sur une aveuglante roue Ixion tourne écartelé dans le milieu des astres lui, le grand embrasseur de noce impardonnable pour mieux nous voir quand le visage des Dieux se détourne de nous en détail (OL, p.50).

It is an example linking, not two circles, but the circle and the straight line perceived as the meeting-point of Ixion’s destiny: whirling round as unitary body but torn into infinity. The image of the eye in the skies also recurs, replacing the face of the Gods as a more relevant communicant and intermediary. Ixion and the moon, stranded in space, pose similar questions. Have we suffered a transfer of gods? Have certain signs deserted us? Where does one find explanation in the universe? What lasting myths come to enlighten our half-and-half condition? * ‘Cendres sur la face’: one thinks of bereavement and grief, sackcloth and ashes. It is more than a naturalistic passage of clouds. It is streaks of reminiscence of the dead, as if their remains sought a burial-place in this lighted hole, or the fall-out of a comet no longer itself in the frame of the night sky. The veiled face appears often as a first enigma in these texts. Is it that the poetic act makes its first incursion as an attempt to clarify an onset of dark drifting in to blur identity and evoke alternative faces in the mirror? À vous (OL, p.29) begins as a dialogue with latent faces, doubles of ‘sacred’ significance in which to glean glimmers of recognition ‘par la trouée des yeux’: Je parle à ces visages sous les vôtres églises qui vous doublent […] On voudrait vous dé-visager

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In the flesh of the text et serrer de pouce à index le haut-fond d’inconnu.

The verb ‘dé-visager’, fractionally split, suggests not only ‘staring out’ another face, but also ‘de-facing’ that face, undoing it, breaking its protective shield in order to sense its infinite, and catch something of its configuration in a nip of physical possession. And the poem ends: ‘Vous êtes difficiles comme la face de Dieu’. The first lines of Contrefable d’Orphée (OL, p.44), one of several creations tracing Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to retrieve the now-blanched figure of his feminine ‘divinity’ Eurydice, are: Voiler la sainte face de ma femme.

The infinitive implies here, however, that the veiling, the ‘ashes on the face’, are less a cause for torment than a muting of the harsh light of the inaccessible, allowing some porosity of human approach. One recalls the first line of Baudelaire’s Ciel brouillé: ‘On dirait ton regard d’une vapeur couvert’3, and the pleading last tercet of poem XXXII: Si quelque soir, d’un pleur obtenu sans effort Tu pouvais seulement, ô reine des cruelles! Obscurcir la splendeur de tes froides prunelles.4

Might not such words hint at a covert love-pact with the moon, scored deeper in our primeval instincts and the layers of myth than one might imagine? That the moon’s face is distanced and obscured as a cosmic icon does not exclude its probing sensuality. The image of love-bites of destiny, whether one sees the moon’s shape itself as the tracing of a love-bite on the sky or the discoloured patches on its face as vestiges of a dubious amorous passion (marking destiny’s sadistic devotions), make it an unusually ‘fleshly’ body. It is no accident that Dormeurs (OL, p.19), drumming up the receptive night-time self, begins: Infirmes sourds nous avançons vers la grande bouche d’idole.

3 4

Ibid., p.47. Ibid., p.32.

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Nor that one should hear a reincarnation of Orestes, delving into ancestral sources which have set their seal on his destiny, saying: J’aurais quêté la nuit. Je tâte un clair-obscur j’explore l’humide un peu le doux un peu de cet espace-bouche subsistant en sueur de sève (OL, p.52).

For the moon, as if branded by that ‘espace-bouche’, is an ‘espacebouche’. In a two-way role, and as proxy of a stronger force, it has been sucked and now sucks us (‘que nous sentons à notre peau’). Nor can one assume that it is not joined by our own lips and mouth, embracing (and inflaming) it not as some arid asteroid but as a voluptuous, humid partner, drawn into a transfer of saps: Des constellations plein la bouche […] Avec le O des lèvres tu embrases des objets sans histoire (RE, p.207).

That the moon traverses the night-time window as ‘lover’ is reinforced by the suggestion of love-bites settled on a body in waiting, laid bare in readiness. If the moon has shed its veils to become sensually explicit (‘la lune étale’), then so, too, across time and space, has the human respondent (‘ayant déposé notre habit de souffles’), as if its veils were its wreaths of breath, suspended now to facilitate the intimacy of a new coupling. Sloughing the skin of the human self is a persistent motif. It emerges, woven with images of turning-points in time, ‘manna’ from heaven, the devouring mouth and the entry of an amorous double, in L’Ombre (OL, p.27): Dans l’apogée du soir nous dévorons le pain […] Un double enlève aussi sa veste et se dispose un peu de biais par rapport au plaisir.

The finale brings night closer still as an animate partner, adept at removing the ill-matching curtain between our lives and the uncategorized mystery of the world:

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In the flesh of the text La nuit vient vers la draperie mal ajustée de notre vie sur l’indistinct du monde.

If L’Ombre is a telling title, then so is Allongée (OL, p.18). Though the communicating body here clings face-down to earth, grass and forest rather than sky, the nudity glimpsed through the veil of clothing is an invitation to a distantly rooted reprieve: Sous sa robe la nudité connaît la trêve heureuse des cailloux des racines.

Its finale returns to the meeting of mouths, perfectly superimposed: the prelude to a silent passage or passage of silence which homes inwards then to proceed infinitely beyond: La bouche sur la sienne se tait. Le silence longe les veines arrive au cœur descend vers l’Océan.

‘Undressing’ oneself, stripping off the covers or vain accoutrements in order to touch a ‘second self’, takes on more force (especially given the recurrent verb ‘étale’) when seen alongside the first stanza of Voyage (OL, p.65): Au fond du ciel il n’y a pas cette pacotille bas jupons boîte à fard que j’étale sur lit étranger.

It also gives point to the missed chance for allégresse in a text of that title (OL, p.75), where a passing cloud, transient though rich with perennity, fails to lift the veil from a woman condemned to a living death while, seemingly close to the ear, there drifts an airy vitality and the prospect of a ‘shared’ death defying time. It is the difference between cloud thickening in the form of ‘cendres’ and shroud, or melting as liquid gauze (if only one knew how to melt with it): La femme d’aujourd’hui se regarde mourir ayant comme premier suaire les vêtements qu’elle a parfumés ce matin sans prévoir qu’une douceur pressante de nuage lui parlerait du Christ de sa mort de leur mort

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Opéra des limites avec une allégresse d’eau légère.

The adjective ‘double’ is pivotal to Suite au dieu-lune (with its presiding hyphen of the two-in-one). It appears in the central line, at the interface of the two ‘phases’ of this first sequence: between stimulus and response, between lunar attraction and human gestures drawn towards it as if through tracing-paper, between what brushes the skin from outside and what burrows below. The plural ‘seuls’, which might imply lovers apart from everyone else or two solitudes alongside each other, and the use of ‘double’ in the singular, act here like a tilt-switch. They are also a symptom, like a rash aroused at the antithetical mid-point, of a text marked by its duality. (This section is the only one of the nine to have two parts, and to have a ‘double’ in the form of a cognate text, the two twinned as vases communicants.) For the opening sequence hangs on its tremor of dualities: abstract and sensual, virtual and visceral, distance and proximity, the covert (‘cendres sur la face’) and the overt (‘étale’), the curtained (‘à double rideaux’) and the unveiled (‘déposé notre habit’), the animate (‘les bêtes marchent’) and the inanimate (‘meubles’), isolation (‘seuls’) and belonging (‘de notre espèce’), possession of self and loss of self (summed up by Baudelaire in his maxim: ‘De la vaporisation et de la centralisation du Moi. Tout est là5). ‘Nous répétons…’, marking the shift into the twin segment with its stress on human receptivity (‘dans la chair de notre espèce’), may mean that the gestures in question, deep within as an instinct, are now conjured up once more; or that we repeat them after the moon, as a docile disciple. In either case, one senses a transmission of primeval energy, prowling one’s intimacy as surely as one’s corpuscles. As another poem from Opéra des limites, entitled Seuls (OL, p.74), states: Une inquiétude ancienne vit et se perd en nous… .

Is it that same disquiet, throbbing and fading, which shadows this courtship of the clair-obscur? If the opening piece of the sequence, especially in its two-part form, effects a move from ‘ciel’ to ‘bête’, from celestial attraction to deep animal stirrings, it is to remind us that not just cosmic mysteries 5

Ibid., p.1271.

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but primitive determinisms in our nature go back to time immemorial. The simile itself, tied to the repetition of ‘marchent’ (miming the sense of ‘Nous répétons…’ to make one wonder if simile is not also a ‘geste ancien’, an imaginative reflex rendering what logic cannot justify), becomes a ‘crossing’ between realms. So, what lurks in the flesh from lost eras tips uncomfortably close to the spirit of marauding animals still stirring in the creak of furniture with its memory of virgin forests. That haunting reminder, passing between moons and woods, is a tenacious component in the self-definitions of Bancquart’s work. Liturgique (OL, p.15), charting a disturbance puckering the impassive lunar ‘front’, begins: ‘Plissements du loup dans la lune’. And the same poem ends, as if the slightest displacement from one’s centre were enough to let in the influence of flora and fauna, with the question: S’il suffisait d’être à côté de notre cœur pour entendre les battements de solennités végétales dans une solitude de fennec et d’oiseau…?

Other texts rub even closer on the image of ‘fibres des meubles’: La main sur le bras du fauteuil tâte une vieille forêt de bêtes (OL, P.28).

In this case, too, an accidental gesture dislodges life-forces capable of diluting a tightness of destiny: Une second enfance émerge du filtrage à travers l’étamine amère du destin,

just as in Suite au dieu-lune an animal uprising in the veins of wood shakes off the claustrophobia of a ‘pièce à double rideaux’ and the dessicated stiffness of ‘meubles’. The first words of Langage (MA, p.115) are ‘Au bois traire un langage végétal’: an expression of faith in succulent textures and their inner channels, in juices which have not dried hard. Orpheus’s ambition, in descending into the dark with the veiled face of Eurydice troubling his sky, is to Grouper bêtes et astres autour d’un chant ductile (OL, p.44).

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Suite au dieu-lune, whose elastic sequences compose just such a ‘chant ductile’, pursues the same ambition. The line which succeeds ‘Au bois traire un langage végétal’ is ‘Égorger le temps’. The opening two parts of Suite au dieu-lune tread a parallel path: from ‘fibres des meubles’ reclaiming their milieu, to a more acute awareness (‘anciens’, ‘hors de l’histoire’) of time eluding one’s ‘domesticated’ chronology: ‘Le temps échappe aux montres’. The stylistic contraction of ‘Sous elles…’, like ‘le soir’ earlier, makes of these phrases mini-bottlenecks through which the text squeezes in its transfer to a time below time. À rebours (OL, pp.40-41) says: Je laisse à qui voudra le bénéfice du temps réel comme vous dites non acceptable à l’identité lente de ma chair.

Again the theme is a swopping of times: the jettisoning of daily metronomic exertions and their tick-tock imposture, in favour of slowbreathing possibilities linked to a visceral identity which accepts no age. (Henri Michaux, feeling out his ‘slow identity’ in La Ralentie, also recovers lost tempos and alternative rhythms of survival: ‘Ralentie, on tâte le pouls des choses 6.) Segmented time is a false habitat. The ‘real’ self is a state of ravelling and unravelling,as Dévide shows in its finale, where determinants of self as well as those of language (with its narrow hair-splitting and over-studious play of obscurities) become unpicked, released to a spacier option: Et déjà ce mélange de tous les temps me dévidait loin des embrouillis de lexicologue (OL, p.30).

If the words ‘under-lying’ (‘Sous elles’) and ‘dis-cover-y’ (‘Nous finissons toujours par écarter les étoffes’) cohere, it is because the escape from watches (like Dali’s ductile time-pieces draped limply against the infinite?) and the uncovering of self go hand in hand. For what lurks beneath the flesh, in the grain of furniture, under the clockwork face of time, is a ‘circulation’, rotations of vitality. Their rhythms may leave more to be fathomed than they first suggest. As one reads in Énigmatiques: Un rythme naît 6

Plume, p.41.

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In the flesh of the text plein de faille, pour ta scansion plénière (E, p.33).

But the ‘lack’ in the cadence seems to invoke, if not an epiphany, then some temporal visitation in the blood. Felt, indeed, as a pin-point contact of outer and inner worlds, an intercession (‘un doigt se pose’) with the sensitivity of a seismographic needle or the sureness of an auscultation. Disparus (OL, p.56) reproduces approximately the same image: ‘Un petit doigt remue dans notre cœur / avec les reflets de Paris…’. It, too, records a physical touch ‘homing’ in from far off. It, too, involves the same potent triad that affects Suite au dieu-lune: ‘doigt… cœur… reflets’. A piece from Énigmatiques contains this address: Lune, pointille le corps qu’étouffe le temps compact, le sang. Fragmente, atteins le centre immerge ton miroir (E, p.33).

It is a call for the moon to punch holes in the dungeon, to thin the resistance of time and the density of blood. It is a process already underway in dieu-lune, with its finger poking through self-enclosure and its escape from chronology. This ‘de-suffocation’ has numerous reverberations. It links with the mirror as duplication or ‘doubling’, and with images of windows. Plus tard (OL, p.31) starts by stressing ‘la solitude entre miroir et chaise’: isolation in a room where self, framed in domestic rectangles, contemplates self. As the poem evolves, however, a sensual contact is imprinted on the skin (‘La bouche imprime […] de ces baisers qui laissent une trace de rouge’), like the ‘suçons du destin’, to be followed by the text’s only single line, in its own way pivotal: ‘La route luit fugace à la fenêtre et dans la glace’. So, a fitful light from outside throws its bridge from the square of the window to that of the mirror: from lunar face to that of the self. Rachète (OL, p.79) begins similarly with the phrase ‘Imminence de ton visage’, describing ‘Quelque chose comme un filtrage’ occurring ‘à travers la fenêtre’ to create a merger of two orders. That the tight room waiting to be opened (or the face anticipating its otherness) is inextricably bound to the act of writing emerges from a poem entitled L’Autre (OL, p.58). Here, too, into that confined ‘ink-space’, ‘dans la pièce de tous les jours avec une odeur d’encre’, there comes a distant

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sign-language, releasing the natural elements into the relatively dry compartment and flooding the blotting-paper box with sea-water, before it withdraws again to the appropriate wordless distance: Ton autre en face devenu l’autre prend congé à bonne distance.

Is the moon such a visitor, shedding glints in the ink-well as a light between mirror and otherness, recognition and non-recognition? It is in such a sense that the first line of Insomnies (MA, p.107) refers to: ‘Masques posés au carré de vitres’. The square of the window-panes, like the square pages of text within which faces appear, is where false selves are discarded and others taken up at the threshold of possession and non-possession. Two pieces from Opportunité des oiseaux cast sidelights on this issue. In Délivrés (OO, p.53), one reads: Ayant donné la ruine de notre visage nous aurions alliance aux merles.

Souhait (OO, p.107), in parallel, whispers: Oter assez de nous en nous pour mériter une présence.

‘Cendres sur la face…’ may have been a prelude to a finer sense of presence. To lose face, to decompose the image in the mirror, is a possible key to acknowledging freer-flowing forms of existence. And to ‘thin oneself’ out, to reduce one’s autocratic (or simply autonomous) density, may, by erasing the resistant, admit the ‘grace’ of a superior alter ego which can take leave of the ego. In this context, where ‘Notre figure […] dit allégeance aux millénaires’, that ‘grace’ may be to rejoin one’s own timelessness. ‘Je te baigne dans une vieillesse du temps’ (OL, p.67), says the voice of Pétrisseuse. ‘Métaphore de millénaires / ton reflet bouge…’, it adds. In dieu-lune, the moon becomes such a metaphor, as does the poetic self, as does every hard-earned verbal capture. And as language is kneaded and moulded, extending reflections on the sheen of a moving surface, it is language learning to reimmerse itself beyond time.

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* If the first part of Suite au dieu-lune is in two facing sections – evoking ‘double rideaux’, reiterative gestures and the effects of mirroring – the second part finds a different form. This will be true of all subsequent movements of the nine-part poem. Each part elaborates its own obscure prosody. Each, like the moon, is a ‘phase’. Each has its own space, and its own rhythmic duration and contour within that space. The poem is, indeed, a suite: a sequence with threads of continuity recurring, but incorrigibly metamorphic, reborn from itself in a succession of poetic faces or ‘incarnations’ (the word which appears here in the second line). That the poem depends for its susceptibility to ‘otherness’ (especially in the earliest stages) on suspense or ‘in-between-ness’ in time, is signalled by the first words: ‘Au crépuscule’. As isolated noun-phrase, it matches ‘le soir’. As an opening line, it connects with ‘Le temps échappe…’. And as it steps over a permeable threshold, it triggers a kind of uprising: ‘se lève’. ‘Incarnation’ sets the tone for this second part. Whereas the split nature of the first, despite intimate contacts (‘nous sentons à notre peau’, ‘la chair de notre espèce’, ‘le sang compulsé par le cœur’), conveyed a sense of spatial and temporal distance (‘la lune étale au ciel’, ‘ils sont hors de l’histoire’, ‘échappe aux montres’, ‘allégeance aux millénaires’), its successor reflects a rare degree of indivisibility. Proximity is made more explicit: ‘Abolie la distance…’. It is a lunar meditation, then, leading not to a dreamy detachment from the world at large but to closer dovetailing with it. It is as if one were seeded in the world as a condition of growth (‘Notre impalpable emblavure au monde’), and not a foreign body passing in a no-man’s land. Upwards, the space between man and sky is also spanned (‘Abolie la distance entre nuage et nous’), movers in a single malleable medium. All is seemingly of one flesh, a woven density (made more binding by the phonetics of ‘sang… sève… se tisse…’). A secret blood finds confluence with the sap of the vegetal world: man (or woman) made forest, exudations of one vitality. Through how many skins can one join how many bodies? The ending of À rebours shows a reaping-in of elements and an overlay of bodily selves, like strata of the universe: Mon corps cheval se couche sur mon corps falaise en vue de mon corps océan (OL, p.41).

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Similarly, in a finale which brings new coherence to this second section of dieu-lune, flesh, flora and celestial ‘thereness’ come to be felt (hence the encompassing ‘Notre’) as an indivisible fabric, Notre corps la fleur et le dieu tout est compact.

Even so, the poem cannot evade paradox. For, not only does its tactile expression fringe the nebulous, with ‘incarnation’ bordering ‘impalpable’ and the weightless adjective itself fused in the ‘pulpy’ phrase ‘impalpable emblavure’, but the expression of compactness is conveyed by a verse-form characterized (in contrast to its predecessor) by greater dispersion: as if released as miniature ‘islets’ or levitational haikai, more spacy than ever. * If some intuition of divinity penetrates the experience of the poem, it is more as a note swelling and receding in the receptivity of the text than as stabilizing centre. It is ‘le dieu’ rather than ‘Dieu’, only one expression of the ‘beyond the human’ in the trinity which is ‘corps… fleur… dieu’. The word is sufficiently powerful, however, just as ‘le sang compulsé par le cœur’ flows on to become ‘l’intimité du sang avec la sève’, to generate a transitional energy into the third part, where it appears, not as final partner of a trio, but as inaugurating authority in its own right, even if still a hybrid: ‘dieu-lune’. That ‘dieu-lune’ (isolated at the ‘top’ of the poem) is an initiator of vague movement (‘attire… bougent… remue’). Far from standing off as visible symbol, it intervenes vibrantly in the terrestrial plane. It breaks boundaries. Again the emphasis is tactile. An embracing wind stirs high branches as if they were the captors of an epidermic universe. The body takes up magnetic directions through the realm of sleep. ‘La rue verte du sommeil’ harks back to ‘l’intimité du sang avec la sève’ in its suggestion of chlorophyl, nourishment and night-time fertility. The virtues of green recur in Chêne vert (OL, p.35), where a tree’s fluent space, pumped by photosynthesis and supple transfusions, becomes one’s own: Un arbre où le passage frais de l’eau imbiberait la sève d’une fugacité habitable pour nous.

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In Contrefable d’Orphée (OL, p.44), the contradictions of life and death, liquid union and arid exile, are orchestrated in a torn voice. Être encore au jeune moment où des sucs de bourgeons naissaient parmi les lèvres d’Eurydice,

muses the hero, before accepting the bitter truth: C’est fini: le dieu sec a capturé la fraîcheur de mes vignes. Je hais l’avidité de la vendangeuse qui va derrière au même pas que moi coupant les grappes de mes notes entre ses dents pour barbouiller ses joues de fards interdits à mes lèvres.

Clearly the ‘dieu-lune’, in the poise of this one moment, is not such a ‘dieu sec’. Far from draining one’s first freshness, he / she reopens precariously the ‘rue verte’ of inner dreams. Instead of being subject to the grim reaper scything the juices of life, the dead, as one will see in Part VII, are invested with new vitality. The blanched cosmetics of a deathly divinity (such as those worn on the face of the moon), whose artifice signals the drying up of poetic song, are nowhere in evidence here, in this self-recreative poem where all is movement, transfer and the testing of frontiers. And if, for Orpheus, the would-be kiss is left out in the cold, it is hardly the case in Suite au dieu-lune, where tentacles sound the flesh, leaving their record of those ‘mystérieux suçons […] que nous sentons à notre peau’. O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.!7

Relief of the flesh, release from self-containment, is the subject of the central five lines of this part. It is a project fostered by indeterminate agents: ‘Des choses bougent…’, ‘une force remue…’. Their fluency is conveyed in the suite of enjambements by which each line ‘melts’ into the next: ‘bougent  imperceptiblement’, ‘soulagent  d’être’, ‘remue  par le dedans’, with each verb generating its ‘overspill’, its refusal of boundary. Their penetration is such that no part remains ‘toute seule’. The flesh of the text dissolves, body ‘running into’ body, 7

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, line 129.

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and acquires continuity. The five-line sequence, telling one that ‘une force remue par le dedans’, is the centre of this section. It is an ‘inner chamber’. Flanking it textually are the pressures of two external stimuli: one ruffling surfaces of the natural world to draw the body outwards, the other scouting the defensive perimeters and encroaching inwards, as if in a pincer-movement of bodily possession. The gesture of intercession draws attention once more to the imagery of windows. Something prises its way through closure. Not so much ‘une étrange patte’ but a less definite go-between: ‘une patte d’étrange’, feelers of the unfamiliar, playing a surprisingly concrete role in the invasion of being. In Dormeurs (OL, p.19) the traversing of ‘volets’ (linked functionally with ‘rideaux’ and ‘vitre’) constitutes the vital break-through, admitting ‘le soleil à travers les lames du store’; while in Plus tard (OL, p.31) an unidentified ‘doigt [qui] se pose’, making filigree patterns round the ridges of one’s resistance, comes closer to deciphering the manuscript of human existence than any formation, however probing, of written words: Notre vrai texte c’est en déchiffrant une patte d’oiseau sur l’ornière.

* It is only a slight transition, a slip from outer to inner, from the image of ‘volets’ to that of ‘paupières’ raised and closed over the eyes. Part IV harks back, hypnotically, to the same stimulus as at the outset of Part I. ‘Cendres sur la face / la lune…’ replays ‘Lune? / Son visage…’. It is the same but different. Not only are the terms reversed, as if moon and face turn like Ixion’s wheel, never in the same position twice; but the moon itself reappears with a shifting aura, fringed by an interrogative halo, as if not quite identifiable as itself. A problematic moon: ‘Now you see it now you don’t’. Is its light its own or not its own? Is it an asteroid or a glow of myth? A sterile nugget of stone or the St. Elmo’s fire of a memory of goddesses and gods? As medium (and as problem of origins) it transcends categories, including partitions of male and female identity. Its face is not a fixed point de repère. Nor a dead, glazed eye. Nor a thing at rest. Just as ‘cendres’ first veiled it in the doubtful, so, here (in a metamorphic moment of the text), it is characterized by

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disturbance and a fitful pulse. (Is the repeated syllabic note, ‘tumulte et pulsation’, enough to evoke a half-heard heartbeat?) The subject of this phase is the play of eyes. A correspondence is established between that turbulent cosmic face and, not just the visible human eye, but the inner eyes of nerves and psyche which avoid the light of day. Hence the paradox of attentive eyes (‘Nos yeux ouverts […] suivent’, ‘Nos yeux ouverts épient…’) alert behind the lids of sleep. Sommeils begins: Quand nous sommes allongés dans nos paupières surgit aux caves de nos corps une mère d’éveil Mnémosyne de nos ancêtres (OL, p.39).

Such an ‘awakening in the cellars’ echoes the entry, via the same noun ‘paupières’, to the vision which moves this section of the moon suite. The expression ‘Mnémosyne de nos ancêtres’ dislodges, in literary memory, other reminiscences. One recalls the obscure itineraries on offer in Michaux’s espace du dedans8, or Eluard’s surreal perspectives in ‘Elle est debout sur mes paupières’9, or André Frénaud’s Poèmes de dessous le plancher and their carnal underground10. À vous (OL, p.29) starts with the words ‘Je parle à ces visages sous les vôtres’, sketching affinities with Michaux’s disruptive faces and the perturbing doubles that rise from the pond of paint to occupy the space of his graphic art. Bancquart (like the Michaux of Postures11) charts the positions and tentative adjustments of her ‘night-self’ – ‘Mais nous changeons de pose dans les draps’ (OL, p.19) – with each shift provoking new routes of apprehension in a bottomless definition: ‘travels’ elucidating, however inconclusively, the crepuscular zones of ‘notre vie confuse / entre l’immonde et la douceur nocturne des prunelles’ (OL, p.47). Might one say that the relay of faces – moon’s eye capturing one’s own and then an inner eye taking that invasive conquest deeper into the marrow – reflects a yearning for some transcendent serenity of face? For the text Peut-être (OL, p.33), written in conditionals and futures as a conjectural scenario, ends (as it slips from ‘moi’ to ‘nous’) with this prospect of appeasement: 8

Title of a collective volume, Gallimard, 1966. ‘L’Amoureuse’ in Œuvres complètes 1, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, Gallimard, 1968, p.140. 10 In La Sainte Face, ‘Poésie’, Gallimard, 1968, p.5. 11 In Déplacements Dégagements, Gallimard, 1985, pp.123-37. 9

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Ma figure aussi oublierait ses lèvres d’injure et d’envie. Nous serions ces dieux d’amour archaïque au visage poli sous la fente des yeux.

In the same vein Eau (OL, p.71) begins with a dispersed other face and ends with the chance of fusing with it, not just in a single ‘visage poli’, but as an identity in an invulnerable time which abrasions and erosions of passage would not ‘deface’: Au fond de l’eau je vois ton visage étrange et proche qui brouille une source dans la rivière. […] Je sortirais notre lithophanie de couple du plus secret ruissellement. Sur elle les chiens du temps évertueraient en vain leur langue.

In Dieu-lune the moon, as it reaches in to reap that ‘crop’ of self sprouting in the interior, appears to traverse a common hole, in a single ‘trouée des yeux’ (OL, p.29). No barrier holds apart inner and outer. Eye in space and eye within become a seamless whole. (‘Sa cueillaison’, thematically extending the seeding motif of ‘notre emblavure au monde’, paints the moon as sickle, sweeping across the sky as it collects a human harvest.) Bancquart’s poetry is a search for paths of communication. Sommeils, which begins ‘Quand nous sommes allongés dans nos paupières’, goes on: ‘Nous devenons passionnément metteurs en scène de chemins’ (OL, p.39). We have seen bodies drawn to the lushness of ‘la rue verte du sommeil’. The ‘cueillaison’, its seasonal successor, also marks lines of direction: ‘Nos yeux […] suivent le cours de sa cueillaison’. And the final note re-emphasises ongoing movement, this time along the map-lines of one’s ‘trajet des nerfs’. Trajectories of vision are at the poetic core. If earlier one could have ‘Notre figure un peu reflétée dans la vitre’ and in this part a ‘visage […] marqué par tumulte et pulsation fragile’, implying imperfect clarity and visual disturbance, this is no longer the case by

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the end of the section. Comparative lack of focus is superseded by extraordinary sharpness (as if the moon had emerged from behind a cloud): apparent in the repetitive ‘Nous yeux ouverts…’, ‘Nos yeux ouverts…’, with its voracious ‘double-take’ and unrelenting focus; and in the acuteness of the verb ‘épient’, alert and missing nothing. * In the long transition from the love-bites of destiny to the peeling back of clothing, to the mingling of blood and oozing sap, to the relief from being flesh alone, to the passage from single moi to an expanded nous, to the transcendence of masculine and feminine, one is pursuing the persuasions of a force of love. Love, indeed, forms the crux of the darkened speculation which is the fifth and central part of the poem. ‘L’amour’ in the singular, ‘Amours’ in the plural, and a dubitative ‘j’aime’ wedged between, form a thread in the labyrinth. It is the most protracted, and (in that it contains an eight-line sequence moulded as a single sentence) the densest and most tortuous ‘phase’ of the script. The text folds back on itself in reflexive debate. It hints at a temporary eclipse or even, as light is withdrawn or rendered dubious, the inkling of a ‘dark night of the soul’. The first couplet is clipped and compacted. Devoid of verb, it is ‘unmediated’. It is already a selfquestioning example of what, in the lines following, is referred to as a ‘fragment dans un livre’. The interrogative mood, unsettling the piece from the outset, brings a stab of doubt: that, amidst the juxtaposed epiderms of two orders, the strange secretions, the transfers between selves, the traversing of barriers and excursions towards unity in a wider time and space, love might (or might not) be involved in the equation. A potency of attractions is undeniable, but nothing exists to confirm that these correspond to or may be interpreted as expressions of what, in human fancy, constitutes love. Hence the ripple between paragraphs of the synonyms: ‘… qu’il faut assurer: j’aime / pour se persuader que…’, conveying a need for reassurance so earnest that it is almost a confession of self-delusion. So, for all the sensed proximities, there are as many distances. ‘Notre vie proche de…’ is countered, as if a million miles away, by ‘Nous aussi sur d’autres planètes…’. The voice which could affirm ‘tout est compact’ is brought to recognise that love, if one may apply

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the term, is lived in tiny fragments plucked from ‘moments between’. If light has glimmered, it is oppressed here by the spectre of an ‘ombre malheureuse’ bent on obliterating last traces. Whereas Part IV could double-stress ‘Nos yeux ouverts…’ and favour a sharpness of vision pin-pointed in the verb ‘épient’, here sources of light are virtually extinguished (‘Une lumière au ciel / c’est un astre mort’), or their leftovers made so tenuous that hardly an eye notices or proceeds to retain them in the frame (‘nos rayons en survie / pour des regards inattentifs et rares’): a drama foreshadowed at the textual heart of things in the negative infinitive ‘pour ne pas voir…’. What promised perennity has difficulty here in resisting the threat of being consumed. Indeed, the ‘consumption’ is envisaged in horrifying physical terms: as a relationship or cycle of devouring and being devoured (‘ne nous mange pas tout entiers: nous qui mangeons / des bêtes apprêtées…’). Is love to be seen as a romantically sublimated servant of that same regime? If not, then why the unpalatable truth sidling from the wings, – which one would rather not see and prefer to wrap in the glossy affirmative ‘j’aime’ – of ‘le meurtre encastré dans l’amour’? That hybrid of perversity is, to some extent, the inseparability of life and death, the unwritten contract which enlists investments of hope and passion, only to ‘devour’ them ultimately to nothing. But it is more than that. It echoes the Baudelairean spectre of love as a contest of sacrificial offerings, as a balance of power between executioner and victim taken to a point where one partner has conquered (or devours) and the other must acknowledge submission (or be devoured): Quand même les deux amants seraient-ils très épris et très pleins de désirs réciproques, l’un des deux sera toujours plus calme ou moins possédé que l’autre. Celui-là, ou celle-là, c’est l’opérateur ou le bourreau, l’autre, c’est le sujet, la victime12.

Does the ‘meurtre’ referred to pertain to the same domain: where only illusions of reciprocity persist, and one pursues the subordination and obliteration of the very object on which one has settled the urge for self-giving and self-transcendence? Where, in other conduits of the sequence, there have been surges of a conjunctive life-force (‘l’intimité du sang avec la sève’, ‘attire un corps dans la rue verte du sommeil’), here, in the bleak centre, there is the chill of death and 12

Œuvres complètes, p.1249.

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extinction. It is no accident that the words ‘morts’ and ‘Amours’ face each other starkly (still with a common resonance) across a divide. Nor that the verb ‘j’aime’, used in the phrase ‘qu’il faut assurer: j’aime’, is, so to speak, ‘rejected’, out on a limb beyond an impediment of punctuation. Cosmic isolation and exile are the base note. A note deepened by the opposition (but similarity) of the two couplets set against each other: two ‘deaths’ (‘c’est un astre mort…’, ‘nous sommes morts’) rolling separately in space and seemingly beyond retrieval. What has become of the reflective glints testifying to an ‘allégeance aux millénaires’? Instead, the gulf of time reasserts its authority (‘mort depuis mille siècles’), as does that of space (‘Nous aussi sur d’autres planètes’). The broken couplets are a broken couple. The fifth part, with its sombre inner debate, brushes against nightmarish prospects: fragments, distortions, negations, monstrosities. It is not the feast, but only the place of the remnants of the feast. It harbours a handful of rays, but rays already in the past (‘C’étaient nos rayons…’), light years away, the glow of a planet still with the power to delude though already extinct. The final word ‘rares’ links with ‘fragments si minces’ to suggest, not abundance, compactness or fertility, but parsimoniousness and dispersion. And those ‘regards inattentifs’, unlike the seeing eye beneath the ‘paupières’ or the sharp bead of ‘épient’, suffer from distraction: a slip to the periphery, a deviation from the essential. * In this changeable text of exits and entrances, focus and fade, wind is an agent of passage. It comes from space, feels out crevices of communication. It is a cosmic breath set to transfer one to another dimension, once it detects our readiness (‘ayant déposé notre habit de souffles’) to swop the faltering human breath for its fuller equivalent. Several parts of the poem are initiated (as if by an anima or wakening spirit) by the influx of wind: ‘Au crépuscule / se lève…’, ‘Dieu-lune / enveloppant de vent […] attire…’ and ‘Une interférence du vent / rafraîchit…’. In each case, the verse calls up an enjambement: in its role as go-between and a threshold to be crossed. Might one sense Rimbaud as a ‘visage étranger naguère’ in a nearby poetic galaxy? Rimbaud whose Nocturne vulgaire sees the walls of the text breached by an enigmatic breath which overturns perspectives and makes him,

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if not the metteur en scène, then an amazed actor in ‘sensational’ scenarios (also enlisting windows, mirrors, lunar light, ‘blêmes figures lunaires’ and the colour green): Un souffle ouvre des brèches opéradiques dans les cloisons […] disperse les limites des foyers – éclipse les croisées.13

And the piece ends, implying that the transformative gust withdraws as easily as it has entered and leaving doubts that one has witnessed anything but a mirage, with the echo ‘ – Un souffle disperse les limites du foyer’: a breath bursting in and a breath already on the way out, a framework of wind. This part is drawn back to the challenge of the face, stirred like an ember as the moon ‘quickens’ under a cosmic fan. It is a tantalizing vision: a face restored from alienation to closeness, from non-recognition to potential recognition, favouring neither. Nowhere in the poem is there a tauter concentration of opposites, seen first as alternations (‘visage étranger naguère / maintenant proche… / jamais tien…’): near…far, real…unattainable, actual…long ago. These are then aggravated by the two-line contraction of ‘jamais tien, / baisé en rêve’, with its suction of deprivation. This is succeeded in turn by truncated antitheses: single-line spasms without verbs, conveying the tension of even starker confrontations. ‘Jamais confondu, jamais plus hors de toi’ is like a vice, interlocking irreconcilables, confirming the marriage of what will never depart but will never be joined. ‘Un glaçon dans les flammes’, at the textual centre, is tighter still: a freeze in the inflammation, chill in the passion, constriction in the expansion. Even as the conclusion approaches, antitheses march on. ‘Vent et visage’, in a partnership of invisibility and feature, dissemination and form, vie for precedence at this borderline of retreating faintness and sharpened vigour. (‘À peine possédés / présents…’ plays a similar game of hide and seek, switching the order of ‘maintenant proche […] jamais tien’.) There is hesitation between what is indubitably keen on the senses, and what is somehow fictitious, a ‘feint’ in the shadowboxing of the universe, a less than convincing over-emphasis (‘proche pathétiquement’, ‘fait semblant de mourir’) which distorts the authentic and leaves one uncommitted. The final legacy of the poem is a sense of contradiction between the enduring and the ephemeral. 13

Œuvres complètes, p.141.

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‘Jamais’ is answered by ‘C’est toujours’, while the last line, ‘la longue intimité d’anis dans ta chair passagère’, teases one with a lingering possession, like a Baudelairean scent, in the heart of fleeting mortality. And if certain Baudelairean perfumes ‘pénètrent le verre’14 as disembodied but sensual message-bearers of a kind of eternity, then so does that fragrance of aniseed penetrate glass in the form of the ‘fenêtre fraîche’ and the ‘coffre’ of one’s perishable body, to become a communicant of no face, a second soul, borne on a fitful wind which knows no time and refreshes all. Is it significant that, in the play of pronouns, this section is the arena of the toi: ‘jamais tien’, ‘jamais plus hors de toi’, ‘dans ta chair passagère’? If a would-be twin haunts the first part of the text (‘ce visage étranger […] baisé en rêve’), it is never rejoined as such. In its place, grace-like, is a more discreet transfusion of otherness: a scent in the self. A scent such as those which hover at the thresholds of this writing, inscribed in the senses but hinting at beyonds: ‘Il y avait des seuils presque noirs, hantés de menthe et d’origan’ (OL, p.14). Or those which, even in the most arduous of texts, are eked out of the acte poétique as a last acquisition, a contaminating flutter in the space between: ‘Clignement de saveurs sur la brutalité des intervalles / entre l’être et l’espace’ (OL, p.103). * Each part of the nine-part sequence is a ‘passage’. One passes, by unpredictable thresholds and the most nebulous of slippages, between the veiled and the more luminous, the awakened and the slumbering, the proffered and the withdrawn. In this case, the passage (heralded by the interplay of ‘rafraîchir’ and ‘mourir’) is between the quick and the dead. And, just as there was then a stir of ‘animation’ (‘Une interférence du vent / rafraîchit…’) restoring life from the folds, so here the dead emerge again, with surprising suddenness, from their seemingly insensate realm to enjoy a second lease and a rejuvenated self-awareness. Perhaps other kinds of passage are alive in the mind. For the last line of the previous part, ‘la longue intimité d’anis dans ta chair passagère’, following the allusion to a death which is not quite a death, prompts from the wings a more natural association, ‘intimité 14

Œuvres complètes, p.45.

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d’amis’; while ‘chair passagère’ conjures up, like an aural illusion or cellophane transfer, its homophonic partner ‘chère passagère’, slumbering there ready to be roused. So, the ghost of affective relationships becomes a strand of an Ariadne’s thread. There is more in the flesh than flesh alone. ‘Saurons-nous cesser d’enterrer les morts?’ asks Frénaud in the title of one of his most searching poems15. The implication is that the dead do not subside once and for all, but return to draw us, via permeable membranes, across thresholds of time and space. Such is the case here. Not, however, as morbid vision but as surplus vitality. The dead resurgent: thawed by a leakage of emotion from the ‘other side’ and converted from relic to reincarnation, from repugnant reject to fund of beauty and desire. What previously was a ‘fragment si mince’, sign of lack and transience, is here, as mere ‘lambeau’, hardly bigger. But it acquires a changed pace of being (‘ce lambeau très lent’) close to a serenity of time. And instead of a shroud cast over a stone-like ossification, that ‘shred’ rests on them as light as a celestial veil, ‘re-dressing’ them. Shedding or putting on clothing has been threaded throughout as a motif: ‘ayant déposé notre habit de souffles’, ‘Nous finissons toujours par écarter les étoffes’, ‘Dieu-lune / enveloppant de vent…’. It is part of a wider process of veiling and unveiling. Visually, it is cloud or mist over the face of the moon: ‘brume sur lune’. Figuratively, it is ‘phases’ of vitality emerging and receding, dulled and illuminated, against the threat of the arid, static or uniform. It is the awareness of different levels of self-searching, and of age-old memories defying oblivion. It is death relenting and exhibiting its powers of transition. It is a proof of wisps of mind over private horizons, reconjuring the extinct, warming the world with poetry’s gift of reclothing the inert and the denuded in an aesthetic resurrection. In a fluid relay where generosity has no limit, there is a ‘passover’ of another kind. For that gift to the naked dead, the provision of a finer shroud ‘pour se vêtir d’un sang plus spacieux que naguère’, is indeed spacious. Drawn from an unknown source to transfigure them, they pass it on in a widening circle to give human life its ‘other self’, its nocturnal enhancement (‘Ils enveloppent le coudrier, l’iris, l’indigence diurne des vivants’).

15

In Haeres, p.202.

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The responsiveness to ‘un sang plus spacieux que naguère’ brings to the surface the reference to ‘l’intimité du sang avec la sève’. It is a new blood no longer held in familiar circuits, but circulating through a domain which has seemed irreversibly ‘elsewhere’. Lazarus is raised all the more complete for having known, and lived, death. It is not fanciful to hear the strains of a new harmony rising from the verse at this ‘resurrectional’ juncture: the rhyme of ‘beauté’ and ‘lambeau’, the consensus of assonance in the phrase ‘Ce lambeau très lent’, the mellifluous current of ‘brume sur lune’, and the alliterative alternations of ‘Ce lambeau très lent, brume sur lune…’. Nor is it a surprise that this subtle prelude leads to the culminating theme of being rejoined, in this text which travels the keyboard of senses, with a music of the night. ‘La musique’, undefined, global, reigns finally with its own enigmatic authority. It looms similarly at the crux of a poem entitled (with its own complex of flying fragments, evasion and redrawing of ‘faces’) Éclats, fuite, transfiguration (OL, p.63): sonorités perdues pour toujours dans la ligne unique du chant,

where the writer tips in the direction of a unitary music ‘enveloping’ and absorbing all the wounded, wandering, exposed and homeless notes that correspond to a life of inadequate and damaged loves. The same poem ends with the recollection of a time oriented with more constancy and conviction towards ‘le brasier d’un autre visage / transfigurant fuites et tentations’. And Musique (OL, p.70) itself – imagining a music which is not the abstract schéma of a score nor waves of audible elation but a route traced into the very juices of nature and green grass feathering its way amidst the black and white hieroglyphics on the paper (those of poetry included) – speaks of the ideal of halting time and supplanting it with a timelessness with no sectional markers, a ‘blank’ of time beyond life-lines and death-lines existing ‘dans une somptueuse incertitude de l’histoire’: Je témoigne combien tu me précédas dans la sève avec des pattes d’herbe sur la partition la présure des cordes basses caillant le temps vers un oubli du temps.

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Rimbaud is again a compass-point. In Being beauteous, beauty is redrawn with a raising of the dead, beauty with a blood of deeper hue, whipped by winds of space, and over-arched by curves of music rotating in a universe undeniably ‘plus spacieux que naguère’: Des sifflements de mort et des cercles de musique sourde font monter, s’élargir et trembler comme un spectre ce corps adoré; des blessures écarlates et noires éclatent dans les chairs superbes…16

And what could be a more intimate echo of those ‘chers défunts’ released ‘pour se vêtir d’un sang plus spacieux’ than the line: ‘Oh! nos os sont revêtus d’un nouveau corps amoureux’? The words ‘La terre tourne sa peau’, indicating an about-turn or reversal, stay attached to the carnal (to the ‘suçons du destin / que nous sentons à notre peau’ of Part I), but as if one were moving to the underside of skin. The phrase’s brevity, among ‘fleshier’ sentences, conveys a ‘happening’ as rapid as that reflected at the outset by ‘prennent subitement connaissance’. Its position between ‘l’indigence diurne’ and ‘rejoignent chaque nuit’ points to it as a pivot. A pivot, first, between diurnal and nocturnal worlds: between the monocular thinness of a day-time self and the night-time explorer whose ‘paupières’ may seem ‘endormies’ but who gropes via other modes of apprehension towards strange harmonies. A pivot, too, between waking and sleeping worlds, surface and depth, the living and the dead. Above all, perhaps, it is a pivot between two ‘times’: not only past and present, in the form of the dead refusing pre-dictated directions and claiming a life-blood ‘plus spacieux que naguère’, but between two ‘tempos’ of existence. The ‘lambeau très lent’ hints at rhythms distinct from mortal time, better equipped to linger somewhere between past relinquished and past retained. Does one suppose, then, that the text (like the preceding one) harbours an intimation of ‘eternity’? For as one ends with ‘C’est toujours / la longue intimité…’), so the other ends with ‘qui rejoignent chaque nuit…’: both having prised from time something extendable and renewable – their ‘sang plus spacieux que naguère’ – which will not perhaps in the future coagulate so easily. A call, charged with premonitions of ‘la nouvelle harmonie’, intensifies the poetry of Rimbaud: 16

Œuvres complètes, p.127.

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‘Change nos lots, crible les fléaux, à commencer par le temps’, te chantent ces enfants.17

* Reversibility is the hallmark of the poem. It is not only ‘la terre [qui] tourne sa peau’, but the whole experience of poetry in progress. Its face, as much as that of the moon, carries signs of ‘tumulte et pulsation fragile’. Surface and depth change places on a whim. The infinity of space can strike trigger-points of one’s inner world, or the visceral self leak out to lose itself in the immeasurable. One may take in or be taken in. One may divest oneself of the veils of resistance to lie naked, or be rewrapped in an envelope of ‘otherness’. One may alternate between singular and plural. One may cross the frontier of the mirror. The day-time self may be eclipsed by a nocturnal self, and the dead rise again while the living relinquish their fragile authority. Time is not a one-way process. A throw of the switch can trade the limping fragments of the present for the fluent panoramas of a vie antérieure. The ephemeral can be overwhemed by symphonic strains of the more enduring. Light and dark can renegotiate their contract and swop roles. In the eighth and penultimate part of the variable sequence, it is as if the poem, in the process of devouring and being devoured (‘se persuader que l’ombre malheureuse / ne nous mange pas tout entiers / nous qui mangeons…’), had itself gulped down a wrong potion or taken a false route. It is not that the sense of passage is blocked or all transfusion ceases. The vitalizing sap, however, gives way to a liquid invasion turned cloudy, of slack and brackish taste. The difficulty in telling oneself that one is not eaten up by ‘l’ombre malheureuse’, voiced in Part V, reasserts itself here in the treacly density of a ‘marais d’ombre’ (such as convinces Macbeth that he has ‘supped full with horrors’18): darkness threatening, not from outside, but like a patch spreading inside the lungs. The emphasis on the ‘insides’ is not gratuitous. For the ingestion of obscurity is felt to trickle ‘à travers la gorge’. Nor is it difficult to link that passage with the act of poetry and the organic circuitry of words. In Vendémiaire, Apollinaire sees 17 18

Ibid., p.130. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, line 14.

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himself as a gullet of the universe, drinking in, as an intoxicated living poem, seas, animals and plants, stars and destinies: J’ai soif villes de France et d’Europe et du monde Venez toutes couler dans ma gorge profonde […] Mondes qui vous ressemblez et qui nous ressemblez Je vous ai bu et ne fus pas désaltéré Mais je connus dès lors quelle saveur a l’univers Je suis ivre d’avoir bu l’univers […] Écoutez-moi je suis le gosier de Paris…19

In L’Irruption des mots, Frénaud has expressed the extraordinary activity generated as words leap up like a host of amphibians, this time outwards, spawned from his ‘profondes lèvres’, meshing and parting before his eyes as the product of his ‘dieux têtards’: Je ris aux mots, j’aime quand ça démarre, qu’ils s’agglutinent et je les déglutis comme cent cris de grenouilles en frai20.

In Bancquart, the experience may not have the same excitable uplift, given the ‘low-lying’ image of the ‘marais d’ombre’, but it is just as wedded to the problematical act of swallowing words and ‘throating’ poetry. Nor does one doubt the disruptive extremism of the traversée. Perhaps one could say that the act of swallowing, dark as it appears in this instance, is a reflection of poetry seeking to digest its own substance. For it is a text entitled Langage (MA, p.115) which begins, ‘Au bois traire un langage végétal’ and ends with the words, taken down in lumps progressively easier to ‘chew’: Mot Je t’avale Au défi des bons dieux.

‘Extremism’ fits appropriately with a perception of language traversing ‘la gorge des grands maudits’: as if some retribution were 19

‘Vendémiaire’ in Œuvres poétiques, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, Gallimard, 1959, pp.149-54. 20 In La Sainte Face, p.72.

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in train, Prometheus-style, involving torture and rejection. It is also a crucifixion by opposites, as if one were a channel for madly alternating currents lurching between horizontal and vertical, dark swamp and burned-up sky. It runs parallel perhaps to ‘glaçon dans les flammes’, but pitched towards a vocalized torment. ‘La couleuvre’, swallowed as indignity, is not a salamander and may not be as adept at traversing fire and emerging intact from the transmigration. And its slippery movement, ‘se faufile vers…’, trails with it a reminder of the lures of vrai and faux. This portion of the text is not divorced from the energies of dark and light which are the property of the ‘dieu-lune’: the moon with its chalky glow, its luminous evanescence, the centrifugal aureole round a body often erased, its silvery reappearances. If the invasion of ‘marais d’ombre’ does not bring with it that ‘music of the blind’ which came as the compensation of changing sides in the previous piece, nor does it plunge the poem in absolute dark. And if, as in Noirs (OL, p.46), there can be a ‘double-lock’ of darkness, black on black: Doubles noirs sans nulle caresse blanche au sortir de leur corps,

and a fatalistic sense of space with no apertures: Tristesse de damné dans son espace sans extension vers le possible.

such is not the case here. The fragment is still a captor of half-light, a vocal clair-obscur. It clings to a ‘cependant’. A ‘caresse blanche’, though faint, survives. The reader sees sombre glimmers, a muted glow through the patina and verdigris of age, a something that yields in the mineral sullenness. And there is a journey (‘Tu avances avec la lueur d’ardoise…’), a journey becoming more clearly an ‘extension vers le possible’ as the text nears its conclusion. It acquires outreach in space and time. ‘Tu avances…’ tallies with ‘Tu annonces…’, as if the poet were harbinger or prophet, albeit remote, of signals ahead and transformations in potential: alive to pages turned in time (‘adieu’), and to phases clearing the way for others (‘quand il a plu’). This section is by no means static. It belies the marsh and quagmire which were its initial dominant. It veers in the direction of liquid motion: from a transient shower of refreshment to the endless

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prospects of the sea (evoked at the very end, as if the poem became its own contradiction). From the ‘ombre’ a far-seeing eye emerges. The claustrophobic gulp has somehow led to an expansive ‘e-gression’. The linear strictures of ‘trottoir’, ‘fenêtre’ and ‘square’ cede to the limitless, and to a magnetism which is the text’s last word and active end-product. In reaching a shoreline to elsewhere, the poet has not squared the circle but has ‘circled the square’, turning frames into what pulls from beyond the frame (like admitting the moon into a bedroom), and enabling the orb of the eye, placed not in the square but already at its extreme edge, to communicate with a tidal universe. The poem also goes beyond its inaugural word ‘Nous’ to approach the identity of a ‘tu’, traced like a hieroglyphic. Who is this ‘tu’ with whom words weave? A foreign incursor, mediator, kinetic agent, potential liberator, an ambivalent infinity? * There could be few richer symbols of dubious vision than the moon: its eye glazed, occluded, rendered partial, more or less luminous according to propitious or unpropitious moments, as it rolls this way and that in a state of motive (votive?) exile. The poem is a study of changing apertures of vision. It is not surprising that a suite evolving from ‘Nos yeux ouverts… Nos yeux ouverts’ to ‘nos rayons en survie’ to ‘ces aveugles en nous’ to ‘ton œil [qui] évoque la mer’, should return finally to focus on eyes and their problematic capture. If this is the final section of the nine-part composition, then it seems far from finality. Vision is on the verge, awaiting fruition. They are eyes with something missing, moving as the unfulfilled. That roundness which eludes the moon, and is a precarious phenomenon of time, is translated in human terms as the inability to hold in view, right up to their swollen fullness, the ripeness of cherries. The image reinforces those of ‘l’intimité du sang avec la sève’, ‘Notre corps la fleur’ and ‘la cueillaison’ which feed this protracted poetic gestation: in the same way that the presence of ‘des yeux qui ne voient pas le vert’ refers back to (but loses contact with) the implied fertility of ‘la rue verte du sommeil’. The final part is, therefore, motivated by its tantalizing lacune and the recognition of imperfection. Part VIII began with liquid stagnation, mouthfuls of darkness and symptoms of torment. Part IX has similarly unpromising begin-

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nings: an apparent inevitability of non-fulfilment (fixed in the quasiinalterable form of ‘Il est des yeux…’), of arrest at a threshold, of consignment to a limbo of non-renewable time. Like its predecessor, however, this final part, having first passed the gateway of blackened vision, learns the consolations of its own ambivalence. ‘Le noir n’est pas absolu cependant’ is matched (in stress and position) by ‘Pourtant l’imperfection se tisse d’une douceur…’. ‘Cependant’ and ‘pourtant’ are the counterbalances for the poem’s two-sided nature, clawing back a glimmer of ‘otherness’ which had not seemed possible. They are the signs of a fissure opening in the text. They are an unblocking of its statement of immobility, a small ‘absolution’ of its apparent absolute. Might one see this imperfection which relents, which softens from being an impenetrable barrier to become an invitation au voyage and an absorption, as the creative essence of poetry? Is it the same incomplétude which, while leaving one empty-handed, incites poetry to feed off its own void and propels it incurably (to use Michaux’s title) vers la complétude21. Is it a ‘divine imperfection’ such as that which Ponge invites into the space of his writing when he says: Divine nécessité de l’imperfection, divine présence de l’imparfait, du vice et de la mort dans nos écrits, apportez-moi aussi votre secours […] Que toutes les abstractions soient intérieurement minées et comme fondues par cette secrète chaleur du vice, causée par le temps, par la mort, et par les défauts du génie22?

For ‘cette secrète chaleur du vice’ could be a synonym for the ‘douceur qui va de mer au ciel’, which stretches out to span what in a previous conclusion was only a distant evocation of the sea, and which gives structure to what is eternally postponed. Its other name is music: that music beyond scores, with which the blind man in the self was fused, as one light extinguished is replaced by another switched on. Throughout the text, the eye is constantly, if inconstantly, alive. It turns inwards and outwards. It is probing and probed. It retreats behind closed lids and lies exposed. Though ‘regards’ may be ‘inattentifs et rares’, their presence is never snuffed. Though phrases such as ‘sans yeux’ and ‘ne voient jamais’ cloak the text in threat, light never ceases to make its way in and out, ‘as through a glass darkly’, in the rolling thickness of words: ‘à la lueur des meubles’, 21 22

In Moments, Gallimard, 1973, pp.91-110. Le parti pris des choses, p.127.

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‘reflétée dans la vitre’, ‘dont brillent les monnaies dans les anciens tableaux’. Even (or especially) the blind become strangely receptive to other, less visible modes of perception. And, despite a spectral vision of eyes condemned to eternal autumn, eyes which seem doomed to a fate worse than fading shades and half-lights, they are rarely if ever ‘azure-blind’, so reasserting that ‘Le noir n’est pas absolu cependant’. To turn margins of exclusion into habitable space is the call of poetry. What began as a falling short, distances yet to be covered and deserts of non-fruition, becomes room for manœuvre. The gap of deprivation, swept by movements to and fro, by the weft and warp of desire and frustration, is loosely woven into an ‘intervalle habitable’. Space outside is turned into a space between. The alternations of ‘flux reflux’ (palpable in the structure as it swings to one side and the other of the pivotal ‘pourtant’) hold words close to what is almost a centre of ‘between-ness’. The textual fragment, no longer extra muros, becomes an ‘intervalle habitable dans la réserve du dieu-lune’: not outpost but enclave, an allowable breathing-space in a vaster breath. This final part assumes the third-personal form (‘Il est des yeux’). The sketchy, errant dialogue between anonymous grammatical persons (‘nous’ and ‘tu’ as collective and singular, self and other) is no longer in evidence. Might this suggest that the finale veers back, on the verge of ‘la réserve du dieu-lune’ and its ultimate silence, towards impersonal truth, pumiced by ‘le regard limé de l’espace’ (OL, p.38), and from which the particularities and restless negotiations of ‘Nous’ and ‘tu’ are obliterated as largely irrelevant? If so, recognition of that space remains hedged by a ‘Comme si…’ which hinders full entry: a ‘Comme si…’ writ large which keeps the poem between ‘flux’ and ‘reflux’, between what is written and what is partially withdrawn, between reality and mere appearance, so upholding the force of the question posed earlier in the collection: Quoi de vrai? – Quelques mots dératés disant nuage et horizon (OL, p.21).

* The nine-part poem is characterized by its changeability, its passages and passageways. It is a series of in-betweens: intervalles between being and space, between word and silence. It is in

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fragments, cohering and parting, figured and reconfigured, losing and re-acquiring their own threads. It is a series of phases and durations, cut off variously, of unpredictable lengths: a fitful state of metamorphosis. In its arduous and dogged tracking of nine ‘moons’, the influences of which are twisted into its evolution as ‘word-object’, might one see the nine months of a cycle of gestation and birth? ‘On se voudrait gravide / d’alphabets inconnus’ (OO, p.82), one reads in La mort habite, where the wish for a unique linguistic pregnancy, nurtured within, seems the only way of converting death-space into lifespace. The text Publication (OO, p.81) solders this link between monthly (menstrual?) cycles and the appearance of the poem, each ‘issue’, as it were, coinciding not with the full moon but a waning moon, less a possession than a receding, wistful, more tempting prize: Rêve de poème en livraison mensuelle, couvrant toute l’existence. […] Chaque fascicule paraît en lune décroissante…

Suite au dieu-lune may well be Bancquart’s most ambitious attempt to fulfil such a dream of the text. Written in small scattered constellations, a verbal archipelago thrown skywards followed by uncomfortable fall-out, it responds to the same call as that which gives its title to Hors (OL, p.20). It is the expression of a ‘cri s’échelonnant aux profondeurs’ (OL, p.53): a complex of reverberations bridging inner depths and those of the universe. Though mottled with light, its sprouting forms, ‘venus de nos ténèbres germinatives’ (OL, p.16), carry their own implacable obscurity. As a succession of close encounters pursued in a veiled existential intimacy at times almost erotic but discreetly sacred, it reflects ‘notre solennelle privauté avec les choses’ (OL, p.26). As a poem which acquires and loses face, drifts between forme and informe, and slips disconcertingly out of the moi into the sphere of attraction of nomadic personal pronouns, it asks of itself and its own shifting formations what it seems persistently to ask of the moon: Est-ce nous au centre? Ou le centre de la dérive? (OL, p.34).

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And through all its verbal and structural metamorphoses, it never ceases to convey the haunting legacy of ‘d’anciens rêves sur l’existence’ (OL, p.77), common to all and challenging the security of our identity.

SANS LIEU SINON L’ATTENTE

(1991)

Cariatides Grandes femmes plus nues de ressembler à des plantes en fuite autour de balcons tropicaux en plein Nord. Corps minés par le mal de lune comme l’aimée d’un dieu vous vous transformez en plumes et branches vous transmuez vos ventres à la rencontre des oursins. Au-dessus des voitures la passante rejoint votre dérive de fougères. Entre les oiseaux et les portes votre rêve borde le nôtre d’absolu.

Caryatids: contours of woman incorporated into an architecture which transcends them, turned into a point d’appui or pressurepoint in the dynamics and compositional lines of force of a rising structure. The representatives, taken into art and at one imaginative remove, of woman as strength and upthrust. Like the poet, supporting elevation in beautiful form. Do they, like the trees in the following quotation, reaching from subterranean foundations to the airy heights, abolish and trans-figure the poet, sifting away irrelevances to make of her the purified symbol of her higher aspirations: Ils ont brûlé notre figure ne gardant de nous qu’un élan du corps vers le ciel (SL, p.15)?

What more suggestive, if idealized, definition could there be of a caryatid than ‘un élan du corps vers le ciel’? They are not angelic, being more sensually expressive and subject to repression and strain, but their sphere is, if not as spacious as a zone, a niche somewhere off the ground, rendered almost weightless by the balance of forces of which they are an interlocking component: L’ange habite plus haut dans l’intervalle où l’air ne pèse plus (SL, p.110).

In a sense, they are ‘imprenables’, possessed by neither one world nor the other, as implied by these lines from Imprenable (SL, p.79): Avec le vent nous rebondissons vers la cime sèche. Nos vies sont devenues ce coup de feu sur le sommet déjà dans le jour d’un été imprenable.

For is this translation into the purity of stone, rising up in a plane apart, also an example of the call towards ‘la cime sèche’, where the murky disturbances of mortality are drained towards something more quintessential, almost dried in the air? Are they the embodiment, half redeemed from blood, of what Bancquart refers to as ‘ce geste fou vers les oiseaux’ (SL, p.34)? Certainly, the caryatids reach for another

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space. In one’s contemplation of them, and one’s absorption of their suspended impetus, ‘on prend espace’ (SL, p.48). If the poet, in the transmigrations of seasons, can wonder if there may be a similar human access to another space, saying La transhumance de l’année s’approche sans que nous sachions si dans tout l’univers existe le frémissement d’un autre espace (SL, p.52),

then the caryatids, especially in this form of ferns and feathers, come to confirm that there is such a presentiment: a quiver of elsewhereness in the immobility. At the same time, the caryatids are woman. It is not accidental that the leap from the title, like a jumping spark, is from Cariatides to ‘Grandes femmes’: in stark apposition, charged as synonyms, separated but bonded in an influential sisterhood. The first text of Sans lieu sinon l’attente, anticipating this one set eighty pages away, establishes this image: Le corps de la femme baigne du plein au vide à la recherche d’au-delà (SL, p.9).

These statuesque forms are not disincarnate. Though framed in an architecture, they have the rounded lines of bodies, and the bulging strength of bodies, exerted between worlds to feel the purchase of a beyond. Bancquart speaks of a landscape sur quoi la femme immobile imagine cent périples (SL, p.19).

Although not in themselves a landscape, the caryatids do serve as a visual crystallization of inner yearnings, a trigger for words which go journeying to let the self feel affinities of a spacious otherness. The first section of the collection as a whole is Paroles de la femme. These figures are a form of woman’s words. They give image, and voice, to the pressures which debate her definition: the plein and the vide, what weighs downwards and all that rises up. They also give expression to aspiration and frustration, uplift and depression, disconnection and retention. For their mirror is a double one, easily turned between positives and negatives:

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Depuis le ciel tombe délavéé la peine des femmes (SL, p.32).

If, however, one seeks the fundamental ‘oneness’ in the glass, it is that the first words ‘Grandes femmes’ are, indeed, the tremplin or base of the act of building which is the text. They underpin its constructional outreach and take the strain of its ‘lift-off’  verbal ‘cariatides’. The caryatid was originally a priestess: attendant on Artemis, servant of a ‘divinity’ and (like the poet?) an agency between realms, ritual celebrator and translator of a numinous power to be given human application. Is she, as in the present text, a messenger, transcribing things from non-expression to expression, from a tightlipped beyond to an expressive fervour which gives body to abstraction and ‘dresses’ the naked? The opening notation of Solitude de l’ange (SL, p.111) is: Devant le visage du dieu impassible brûle celui du messager.

As title, ‘Cariatides’ stands aloof (aloft) and taciturn. Once translated into the form of ‘Grandes femmes’ and into the pulse of language, it burns with transformative power and creative variation, activating the face behind a face. This carved figure is not therefore simply an architectural intermediary, wedged in the kinetics of building and the stratification of a universe, but more crucially an intermediary in the potential for the unfurling of the poem, between what is composed above and what will be composed below, what settles on the page only to discover its own change, what traces a singularity of voice while reverberating into the plurivocal. These feminine bodies, once admitted to that compact but liberal space which is, for a limited span, the breeding-ground of words, defy their own fixity. They become growth and movement. They wrap themselves round, they show their sinuousity. Above all, they become resemblance (‘plus nues de ressembler à des plantes en fuite’). They are, in a sense, stripped of themselves, enriched with a new bareness, because they take on likenesses. Hence the repeated verbs ‘vous vous transformez…’ and ‘vous transmuez vos ventres’ as processes in action. If ‘Cariatides’ as title acts as the tutelary power over this theatre of words, then, having gone through the archway of the transformative ‘femme’, it becomes a vigorous force of mutation.

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To succumb to resemblance is to fall in-between. So, these ‘grandes femmes’ are depicted as an equilibrium of opposites and as paradox. Released into the ‘space between’ which may be, as the collection’s title suggests, sans lieu sinon l’attente (that is, less a place than a state of suspense which is exile and exaltation), they are both fixture and evasion, flight and non-flight. They are sealed and open, stiff and pliable. They are naked and dressed, blanched and coloured. They are warmth in the cold, a flush of the tropical in the grip of the north. (Does this suggest a twinning of sun and moon? For Artemis, moon-goddess, was sister of Apollo, god of the sun. She was goddess, too, of the moon and the hunt: the luminosity of cold rock on the one hand, and verdant thickets and the throb of animal entrails on the other.) The caryatids are stone and fern, stone and feather (just as the dying friend in La paix saignée, wavering between life and death, will be seen as ‘un grand calcaire blanc’ but wrapped in a ‘mer de fougères’ (PS, p.66)). The motif of the stone and the bird goes snaking through Bancquart’s work. In Seconde (SL, p.18) she brings together ‘Calcaire tendre / à peine sigillé voilà des millénaires’ and ‘Oiseaux en invisible vol’ as the protagonists of a ‘between-moment’ where something breathes ‘entre nuage et nous’. In Durci (SL, p.21), a title bringing a threat of petrification and fear of the Medusa’s eye, the flight of birds and the quiver of leaves meet in a stiffening nightmare, where initiatives of expression and outreaching words become congealed as if in stone, double-locked inside body and room: Ta voix s’en va dans les insectes qui nichent sous les branches. Tu sens ton corps figé en chitine muette. Puis dans la chambre de toi l’arbre entier fossilise avec tous ses oiseaux.

And in a piece entitled Paroles (SL, p.53), linking speech and the act of poetry with the ever-present tomb, the poet unveils a precarious flutter on the edge of silence, whether of wings, ferns or leaves, alongside discomforting references to sealed lips and a sealed grave: ‘Un peu de vie se débat sans oiseaux sous les épitaphes’. Though not as

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explicit in its interplay of birds and stone, Blanc (SL, p.92) gives added edge to the notion of whiteness (which could be that of marble, bones polished clean, the blank of expression, the white of an empty page or other examples of universal erasure). At the centre of the text is the pivotal phrase ‘Un blanc du monde’, while on either side, as if in an unstable equation, are ‘les tours du Sacré-Cœur sous la lune’ (rounded forms in white stone, like those of the caryatids themselves ‘minés par le mal de lune’) and ‘le corps des oiseaux’ (with their mirage of transmigration). Other shadings enrich the pattern. Orpheus is depicted ‘entre les flammes du soleil et la stérilité du roc’ (SL, p.67): a cousin of these other mythological figures held between sensuality and insensitivity, warmth and cold, willowyness and frozen form, rolled as they are ‘autour de balcons tropicaux en plein Nord’ and astride two orders. Vegetation joins in the orchestration. As if also echoing the caryatids who counter ‘la stérilité du roc’ and claim duality by becoming ‘plumes et branches’, the poem Avance (SL, p.13) is enacted between its first line, ‘C’est cruauté de gelée blanche sur les tiges’ (with its stems cased in white and denied movement), and its last lines ‘La perdrix passe dans la neige. On avance dans sa chaleur’ (where the text, suddenly flushed, discovers its own mobility in the stiffness). For even at the ‘cimes’, and especially at that height which borders abstraction, fruits may lose their lushness and rejoin the void: ‘Vieillissent fruits aux cimes’. Such is not the case for the caryatids, who self-resurrect as lianas of stone and as flourish of growth round their blanched bodies. These sculpted shapes, hard yet malleable, load-bearing yet light, linear yet curvaceous, heroic yet womanly, are agents of a mystery of transition as adumbrated in Ombre: Délivré d’être nous notre destin s’amarre au grand mystère traversier (SL, p.14).

On the one hand, they undergo a ‘break-through’, a feathery proliferation of feelers into the elements of air, water and fire which challenges the compress of stone which is their aerial sarcophagus. They are, indeed, liberated from being themselves  where self means encasement and limit  in a metamorphosis registered in the double pulse of the verbs ‘transformez… transmuez’. On the other hand, it is the poet who effects a similar break-through. She, in identifying with them as sprouting metaphor, is ‘delivered’ from being herself into the

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crossing which is poetic metamorphosis. From immobility, she, too, bursts into leaf in resemblances. From an external role carved in words, she becomes ‘dressed’, bedecked with the vitality of the elements and the spread of sensual discovery. An intertwine of birds and leaves often imbues these poems, like a life-support system in their texture. And in the inventive fluidity of words which is their carrier, outer and inner worlds, sap and blood, darting vocal movements, murmuring vibrations and restless reorientations of expression, run as one. As the following couplet suggests, this foretaste of union comes as a flush of life in the cold (the blush of the tropical meeting the north), to aerate enclosure and breach compartments of time: Avec les oiseaux et les acacias de ton sang un peu d’été emplit encore l’heure de la chambre (SL, p.109).

The arteries of the text are supple enough to take the flow of above and below, the aerial and the subterranean (or submarine). They give licence to become a multi-directional creature of the universe. Des vols d’oiseaux sur toi et des poissons dans tes artères. Tu pèses tes métamorphoses (SL, p.108),

are the ‘opening’ lines of Midi, a title also indicating a fractional ‘weightlessness’ in time, suspended above the march of hours and their ups and downs. It is not surprising in this context that the image of the tree, with its volatile transactions between explosive light and a hidden dark, between the vibrancy of the air and invisible liquids below, should reinforce the picture. In the case of Simple (SL, p.72), its patterned waving stirs the dead as an agent of resurrection: Troué de ciel et d’oiseaux l’arbre bouge sur nos ombres.

Bancquart’s poetry is a complete garden. If it harbours (or arbours) statues, then they are laced and revitalized by foliage, reappropriated by nature. So it is that the caryatids, perched in a stony sterility (and in that sense suffering a whitened moon-sickness), are granted the antidote or grace of sources of refreshment which were forerunners, deep in time, of their sculpted symbolism. They discover

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pathways to ancient meeting-points. Their twin is the female figure of Malade (SL, p.10) in her desire to believe and to be leaf: Fidèle à la fable qui ferait vivre un dieu dans le soleil étroit elle tourne son regard vers le carrefour des feuilles.

Could one say that, through the finest chinks of time, the gods of the monument still live? And that the growths of leaf and branch are the fitful bearers of their vitality? (In a different context, Frénaud invokes a resurgence of the original spirit and transformative energy which underlies a statue now rigidified, first voicing her lament, Ils m’ont réduite à n’être qu’une statue de gloire, enfermée dans les carrés déserts de leurs places,

before infusing the text with the disturbances of the insatisfait by which ‘les songes creusent / les paisibles monuments cruels’1.) Fable and legend can unfurl, finding new (or old) voice in the proliferation of plant-life, as they reach towards their creative source in these whispering proxies of gods and dream. Frozen myths melt, revive in the sensitivites of burgeoning nature. Hence these lines from Légendaire: Dans son tissu, des plantes apparaissent, naguère dédiées aux dieux: laurier, narcisse et jeune peuplier (SL, p.63).

The idea of ‘simples’ as medicinal herbs applying their balm, curing ailments and regenerating tissues (including those of poetry), applies to Cariatides with its ‘corps minés par le mal de lune’. It is a similar sick or blanched body which, at a point of near-extinction in Attente (SL, p.93), makes a blind gesture of solidarity towards the élan of vegetal growth. As words fail and one veers wanly towards expiry, a secret renfort arrives which is not just a reclothing but a sharing of bodies, a transubstantiation: Les paroles feront défaut. C’est tout ce que nous savons de notre entrée dans la mort. Pourtant, la caresse du lit. Le corps malade, creux, prend part aux arbres devinés derrière les persiennes. Une couleur sentie du coin de l’œil, à la limite. Une attente qui flotte. 1

Il n’y a pas de paradis, pp.42-43.

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In the flesh of the text Peu substantiel, on arbore enfin l’herbe, le bois, l’étoffe.

So close to petrification (and the cryogenics of symbolism), and therefore on the verge of non-existence, are the caryatids, now ‘redressed’ in likenesses of wayward plants, feathery drifts of fern and translation into a tousle of branches, the expression of an instinct highlighted in Route: Près de l’inexistence nous retient un rebond de joie forestière (SL, p.69)?

For a ghost follows Bancquart, which may assume the form of a sculpted woman from a bygone time, or that of a more nebulous female presence to whom, in a text of that title, the speaker gives the name Elisa (SL, p.17). Just as in ancient times, she notes, women threw beans behind them as they went and, if one sprouted, they became pregnant with a ghost, so she, mysteriously fertilized, has given birth to this phantomatic double. (The poet is one who drops beans behind her, waiting for ghosts not only to rise in herself, but to be raised in others, solicited as the unknown other.) The instant of conception, one learns, was when, faced with the massive wardrobe in the confines of her room, she sought ‘un signe dans le bois’ and looked to read the veined language of ‘l’arbre dans les racines des planches’. From then on, Elisa was with her. Slipping between earth, air and water, branche and plume, between flinty hardness and watery waverings, this is the description of her transmigratory fertility and harmonic straddling of worlds: Tes cheveux s’effilent dehors en branches d’orme. Tes mains sont délivrées de l’inscription Mourir. L’armoire est un haut lieu vêtu d’hirondelles. Cassée, entière, émiettée, lisse, au rythme d’Elisa qui règne également sur le silex et l’Océan, la terre emplit la pièce. Vieillesse du meuble et des aubes, ressac des origines, battent en harmonie avec les herbes du futur, dans Elisa. Fantôme, les flaques du jardin sont pleines de tes oiseaux.

The poet’s relationship with her caryatids echoes that with Elisa. Both ‘ghosts’ refuse the inscription of death. Both break out into feather and branch, become a confluence, turning deserts of enclosure into a garden.

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Birds are a point of arrival in Elisa. They are, like a consummate mise en abyme, a visitation within a visitation. The caryatids, in their inspirational conversion to plumes, represent what is called, in the culminating line of another text, ‘ce geste fou vers les oiseaux’ (SL, p.34). The gesture is ‘fou’ because all the evidence says that they are creatures of stone wedged between worlds in a sealed architectural language, for all time. Enclave (SL, p.44) has as its first image ‘un os qui deviendrait plume’, bone and stone here being of the same family. As if to prove that the body is not doomed to sclerosis, nor to the sarcophagus of history, the fluttering wing of the present redirects it towards a forgotten levitation. In a diptych entitled Christ jardinier (SL, p.39), Bancquart casts the ‘saviour’ in the humble naturalistic role of gardener, with his string of garlic and rye. The effect is instant. The body learns to exceed itself, and time is overstretched in a new mix of earth and air, the solid and the volatile, the here and the beyond: ‘Le corps n’est plus désert. Le temps se mesure / en boue et plumes’. After the gardener’s eclipse, a woman remains in his wake: a poet, playing the rosary of garlic and rye as she gives order and rhythm to a paradoxical celebration of silence: Elle égrène à présent sur l’ail et le seigle un silence de Magnificat.

And, like the caryatid who, as recipient of ‘plumes et branches’, seems to have been designated as ‘l’aimée d’un dieu’, she is there as a tenuous implant, the pliable extension of the root-stock of a briefly grafted god: Parmi les choses de longtemps s’enracine en elle la tendresse d’un Dieu bouturé

In the final section of Sans lieu sinon l’attente, Bancquart devotes a ten-piece sequence to Anges (SL, pp.103-14): angels who have, if not their origins, then at least their only poetic access, in the earth. For each of the ten texts clings, in sounding its first note, to a ‘seed’ of the natural world: ‘La graine… le sillage… le romarin… vols d’oiseaux… les acacias de ton sang… L’arbre à pain… cette surface des feuilles parmi les rouges-gorges… porte au rouge la vigne vierge… terre et fontaine… De la rose à l’inadmissible…’. Angels are in their own way ‘inadmissibles’, but many stepping-stones point in their fanciful direction. Wings and feathers are among such

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imaginative passerelles. They are a filament between realms. Like the birds ‘reddening’ the Virginia creeper, a passage of feathers, arousing surfaces, can generate heat from cold, like fire in stone, as in the following examples: Ses plumes couvent la transparence d’air…

and Plumes: des ailes chaudes évoquent la rumeur des anges.

No garden survives without water. In the economy of the tree, the spread of branches is proportionate to its zone of suction below. So, in the transformative performance of caryatids and poets, the visible (or imaginable) flourishes and sinuous figures thrive on hidden depths and depend, for their roaming, on buried sources of support and creative nourishment. The ‘grandes femmes’, like ‘plantes en fuite’ taking off on the projection of their curves (and conceivably on a twirl of carved acanthus leaves or the everyday ‘dressing’ of balcony plants), must delve, for balance, into the amniotic fluid, cradle of birth, where sea-creatures float (‘vous transmuez vos ventres à la rencontre des oursins’). Bancquart evokes a memory of love revitalised in these terms: ce parfum modifié sur la peau de la vie comme l’eau d’en bas se retrouve perdue et concentrée dans la cerise mûre (SL, p.68).

There is a similar union with the ‘eau d’en bas’ in Cariatides (the ‘oursin’ as point of contact brings an acute prickle to the immersion), associated with tempting fruitfulness likely, as with ‘la cerise’, to call together ‘plumes et branches’. Other texts give pride of place, as burst of inaugural energy or as final crystallization, to ‘Une aisance sousmarine…’ (SL, p.96) (accompanied by ‘lierre vibrant d’oiseaux’ and the ‘profondeurs des feuilles’), or to a bird’s shadow traversing a field ‘comme un ange nageur’ (SL, p.106). That passage or translation from sculpted stone to the humid hollow of a womb  into the ‘ventre d’eau’ (SL, p.118) and into ‘cette crypte en nous / cette connaissance artésienne des entrailles’ (SL, p.70)  is the antidote, summoned up in

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poetry, to any stifling of our ‘souvenir de la main vers une mer première’ or to the drained pallor of a vision of man turned into ‘ce poisson vidé près du crucifié pâle’ (SL, p.117). For such ‘corps minés par le mal de lune’, the poetic act is a door to ‘un creux où boire l’eau de notre corps d’exil’ (SL, p.35). Je cherche le mot qui dirait: […] dedans dehors indiscernables île et mer confondues dans la divinité profuse (SL, p.56),

the poet admits. In striking water after the unfurling of plants, and by reconciling in the one figure the ornamental ‘balcon’ and the liquid depths, the need to climb upwards and to scoop below, perhaps she has lighted on that word, or one of its most vibrant synonyms. The idea of greater nudity coming from the spread of resemblances deserves a postscript. One might think that nothing could be barer than the sculpted lines of classical goddesses and their monochrome bare stone. And that to take on metaphors, in a poetic ‘rein-vestment’, is to colour and diversify that nudity. Yet Bancquart writes: On ne dit pas: eau nue comme on dit chambre nu homme nu (SL, p.38).

It is a bareness or ‘purification’ of a different order (as the isolation of ‘eau nue’, intact beyond a pausing colon, subtly indicates). Perhaps it involves a divesting of human irrelevances, so as to have even freer passage among the elements (and in the transformational sphere of poetry) and take on new ‘body’. Is it an alchemical process, via which dross falls away and impurities are purged, leaving one fitter to accede to the essential and nothing but the essential: Passe au feu. Abolis le filon. Au-delà, commence la nudité de vivre (SL, p.59)?

Is it the stripping away of all but an impetus for otherness, transcending both singularity of form and specificity of lieu? For elsewhere one reads: Rien n’existe encore

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In the flesh of the text sinon le grand désir d’être (SL, p.54).

Perhaps it is a cleansing and clarification of time, as in these last lines of Simple, where the ponderous divisionism of minutes and hours, like a make-up on the face of life, is removed, enabling less coagulated transitions: Démaquillée d’heures la vie rentre dans l’ordre végétal (SL, p.72).

If the cariatides are creatures in-between, then so is the poet, filmed into the text in the role of ‘la passante’. For, in any poem, she is the passer-by, a temporary visitor. It is at this point in the text that a second person enters, raising the awareness of a new plane and multiplying the equation of resemblances. Just as the caryatids reach for the stimulus of other life-forms (‘vous transmuez vos ventres à la rencontre des oursins’), so the walker in the streets (the ‘flâneur des deux rives’ in Apollinaire’s phrase) disconnects from her ‘built-up’ context and goes to meet, not the actual object of stone, but the delicate emanations released from it: ‘La passante rejoint votre dérive de fougères’. So, as if reflected in one mirror and harmoniously twinned, caryatids and passer-by expand into their respective ‘otherness’. And if the former, drawn into the realm of poetry and in a sense ‘redeemed’, undergo a mutation (‘vous vous transformez… vous transmuez vos ventres…’), so, too, does the earth-bound onlooker: from human form in its everyday function into a superior version of movement, rhythm and pliable advance. (The transfer from the relative poverty and rigidity of one state of being into the resources of a different one, embodied in the pact with sea-creatures, is described in another text in this way: […] Tu discernes le bonheur d’un animal que tu ne connais pas, de l’autre côté du monde. Et lui t’enrôle, comme le doux possible de sa rumination (SL, p.60).

One might suggest that the seductive drift of ferns, which is already a transubstantiation on the part of sculpted womanhood, similarly ‘enrols’ the passing poet as the ‘doux possible de sa rumination’.) That drift between the fixed and the fleeting shows also time’s doublesidedness: not only in the juxtaposition of an architectural ‘eternity’

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harking back to myth and the ephemerality of a modern-day ‘passante’ amidst a stream of cars who now savours reflections of her ageless desires, but also in the juxtaposition of two speeds of living: the utilitarian haste of traffic hurrying in direct lines to set destinations (which is fixation in the movement), set against the slow-breathing urge to otherness of ‘la ralentie’ in a swaying euphoric errance (which is fluidity in the apparent immobility). So, the presence of the passer-by in the street fulfils a reconciliation by which two figures are mutually enriched. The ageold joins with the modern, and deeper readings of time with the froth of the expendable present. The high joins with the low, and vertical with horizontal: caryatids up above and the street below; their upthrust and the earth-skimming trajectories of vehicles; the lifted eyes and levitation ‘au-dessus des voitures’ of the ‘passante’and the continuing mundane affairs on the lower plane. Distance joins with proximity, and apartness with fusion. The poet, as a passing textual presence, meets the cariatides as twins, as shared dream, while knowing that they pertain to separate realms. (Whereas ‘rejoint’ unites things as one, ‘borde’ lies alongside, at the edge). ‘Dé-rive’ takes up the phrase ‘en fuite’ in the sense of ‘leaving shores’. The caryatids ‘push out’ from their boundaries, just as the street-walker pushes upwards and outwards from the frame of daily pursuits. In an airy exchange, the former extends from immobility to greater flexibilities of movement while the latter reaches from frantic mobility towards a less hurried serenity. The poem entitled Dérive (SL, p.65) begins: Je te cherche. Sans doute tu es ailleurs

and ends, in italics as if to suggest the frémissement, as one rejoins it, of a vibrant genetic source, Nous nous étreignons dans la dérive matricielle.

And at the heart of the title-poem of the collection, Sans lieu sinon l’attente, one finds these words (where ‘réunies’ links with ‘rejoindre’ in a similar vision of winged flight and navigation in new waters): Mais nous à la dérive nos mains réunies sans mots pour prier

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In the flesh of the text s’écartent vers le haut laissant passer un grand corps d’ange timonier (SL, p.105).

In the dynamics of passage and the subtle effects of mirroring, ‘dérive’ carries an almost perfect anagram of ‘rêve’, all the more inviting in that they share the same phrasing (‘votre dérive’… ‘votre rêve’), so lighting the way from the penultimate to the concluding part. It is a dream between: ‘Entre les oiseaux et les portes’. It moves (like poetry) between free flight and panels of opening and closure. An anagram itself is a form of drift: between sameness and difference, unity and dispersion, the centripetal and the centrifugal, as they affect the component parts of language. It is not therefore irrelevant to the following recurrence of the word ‘dream’, also launched as a consequence of ‘fuite’ or drift: L’eau des ruisseaux fuit vers la mer pendant que le centre serré de l’être exalte un rêve (SL, p.59).

Cariatides, like anagram, is a play of doubles. Its mirroring is crystallized in the final juxtaposition of two dreams  ‘votre rêve’ and ‘le nôtre’  themselves balanced between centripetal and centrifugal: twinned in form and as if one within the literary act, but lying alongside each other finally as parallel aspirations rather than one and the same, so making one conscious of centres and edges. (And, as with anagram, their separateness is blurred, in a mise en abyme, by the knowledge that, in giving voice to the caryatids’ dream, the poet is tending to sieve it through her own.) ‘Seeing double’ is a feature of Bancquart’s poetry. ‘Je prends appui sur une alliée par-delà les règnes’ (SL, p.90), she writes in Voyageur, the cariatides being just such an ‘alliée’ beyond realms. Figures from an ancestral past, their likenesses transpierce time, conjoining their stone and the writer’s bones via the porous text: Si tu me viens c’est avec un long passé d’ancêtres qui entendaient confusément tes os se former dans les leurs (SL, p.71).

(‘Tes os… dans les leurs’ creates a two-sided pattern close to that of ‘votre rêve… le nôtre’.) Infusions of a second person do not guarantee an end of apartness. The finale of Toi leaves in its wake a complex of

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mingling and separation, of penetrative otherness and tenacious selfhood, as in: Tu pénètres mon sang de suc amer solitaire et mêlé de moi (SL, p.66).

And if to feel absorption into the double is a joint enrichment and illumination, it is also ringed with an in-between obscurity: Langue d’absence pour ce double de nous sanglé de noir entre notre intime et la peau (SL, p.33).

So, too, with the caryatids. The language which stretches forwards to meet them, blending their intime with the poet’s in an affective encounter, does not know what, if anything, it has captured. Seeing double is akin to metaphor. Caryatid and poet are the two terms, drawn close by resemblance and shuttling between cognate ‘dreams’ of unity; but defined ultimately, not by one or the other but as the space between, as the movement and not the arrival, and in relation to which the explicitness of words is sadly lacking. The text is an interplay of rencontres: between the ‘grandes femmes’, womanhood writ large, and plant-life as a swaying proxy, between their wombs and the prickle of sea as the hollow of birth; between their high-flown ferny motion and the pedestrian passer-by, between one air-bound dream and another hovering vaguely between worlds. If the poem ends with the word ‘absolu’, it is an indecisive absolute. Even the syntax which conveys it cannot settle or clarify with any certainty. Does it mean: ‘your dream runs alongside our dream of the absolute’? Or ‘your dream hems or edges ours with a touch of the absolute’? In one case, two more or less global dreams lie in parallel. In the other, the human dream is only fringed by the apprehension of another which reaches away into another dimension. And if the word ‘god’ appears in the text, it is only in the tentative and still-distanced form of simile: ‘comme l’aimée d’un dieu’. It must remain a semblance, not won over as an identity. Similarly, ‘absolu’ is a provisional ‘absolu’, tantalizing to the last. If it has some link with divinity, it is only as a diminishing dot or pin-point of it towards which one addresses the vagueness of one’s yearnings, as in

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In the flesh of the text Une abeille prie son point de divinité (SL, p.119).

And if that reimmersion in the regenerative influence of the sea was a sign hinting at a secret of creation, then it is only […] un appel, un signe venus de la navigation mal déchiffrable de Dieu. (SL, p.53).

Indeed, the word ‘absolu’ which finishes the poem is the token of the unfinished. It throws open as it closes. And one parts company with the poet, conjuror of those fleeting ‘plumes et branches’ and drifter into the oceanic wavering of ferns, confronted with her own image, a woman within a woman, armed with her ‘langue d’absence’: Debout dans le jardin qui s’étend à rebours des siècles à notre tour nous crions l’inachèvement de Dieu (SL, p.95).

ÉNIGMATIQUES

(1995)

Carnet: ‘Sauvegardons les ours!’ La couverture affirme ‘En papier recyclé’ sous ce titre. À l’intérieur, des notes sur Kafka, l’amour d’une pénétrante cloche en fa dièse, des listes raturées, rendez-vous, courses, adresses, où l’urgence muette du destin qui n’aime rien tant que le tapinois laisse apparaître un nom d’hôtel: l’Hôtel, tout court, comme on dirait le Beau ou Dieu. Rencontres, lavabos, corps jamais les mêmes, les voici en compact. L’Hôtel. Qui va, qui vient? Sauvegardons les ours parmi ces vestiges, car les jours de Kafka furent éphémères.

Of all the enigmas, none is more disconcerting, more baffling and in a way more minimal than that of the text. ‘Carnet’: a single word, largely sealed on itself, tight-lipped, a clot of expression. It is a confrontation and a challenge. The literary proposal is barely underway when it is half-blocked. A colon is the symptom of its communicative potential and partial closure, its promise and its brevity. Numerous texts of Énigmatiques are drawn into being by the realisation, one might say the necessary upsurge within the linguistic motivation, of problematic language. The very first of them, launched on the massive impulse of one word linked to the elementary creative source, breaks instantly into script – script as transgression, as unmanageable disruption, a sign-language never to be fathomed, which eats at the security of boundaries and takes one by storm from afar: Vagues! Leur écriture irrégulière mord depuis la mer mon corps dans le miroir blême bête nue (E, p.9).

In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh and vice versa. The mysterious script looms large, glinting in the dark, in the culminating phase of another poem, in order to impose a nocturnal mode of reading and a paradoxical proximity: Le lac de Tibériade luisait d’une Écriture inconnue, impossible mais de telle extase que l’aveugle eut finalement des yeux pour lui ressembler (E, p.36).

Books and the darkness create the frame of the text immediately preceding ‘Carnet’. From its outset, the reading of texts is in the interrogative, as is the imminence of speech which hangs on them, to be or not to be: Dirai-je les livres que j’aime les métiers, les pays? (E, p.20)

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Whether such books will declare their hand and be revealed, is a moot point. Will they remain a ‘closed book’, despite the act of speech in progress? Is the writing always at one remove from the saying, as colleagues in dichotomy? Is their relationship inevitably a tormented one? For, certainly, this text turns back finally to the dubious exercise of speech, not enshrined in some seventh heaven of textuality, barely illuminated, barely possessing: … que dire, sinon la nuit, sans cesse, la nuit mode d’emploi?

It arduously articulates its own stages of approach towards obscurity, its medium. If the text is a frontier at which one baulks, it is also a potential mise en abîme: a threshold to the depths, a process of reflections within reflections into which one is snared. For a moment a closed door, it is then a tilt over the brink. The single word initiation exerts that double force. ‘Vagues!’ stands at a distance, with an independent impact, before it ‘translates’ into intimations of significance, puts out feelers, breaks surfaces and claims the ‘foreign body’ within its reach (‘mord / depuis la mer / mon corps…’). In a further piece from Énigmatiques, the one-word ‘Pupille’, also halted by a colon, forms the opening line, sufficient in itself: a challenge to vision and a gate to vision (as yet unopened), as if to say ‘We shall see what we shall see’. It makes the connection between word and sight; but with a momentary jolt, a semi-disconnection from normal relations, before the ‘passage’ or transmission takes place. When it does, as with ‘Vagues!’ whose disorderly écriture proceeds to bite into the speaker’s substance, that shaft of light associated with the pupil of the eye then cuts deep and with a rough exploratory instinct into the heart of the receptive subject, as follows: Pupille: forage vers le cœur avec son sauvage épineux homonyme la prunelle cueillie sur tel arbrisseau qui se hérisse aux marges de l’ombre (E, p.49).

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The uncompromising verbs ‘mord’ and ‘forage’, their charge of energy undiluted, are tokens of the sensual violence of Bancquart’s work. As they are of the expanding potency of these ‘forced entries’, which perpetrate a cellular encroachment, advancing from their oneword clarity into the sprawl of being (characterized by the longer lines, more disoriented syntax and sonorities swirling in the adhesive acoustics of one’s inner thickets). In all three cases, there is a movement inwards which gains momentum. The single words ‘Vagues!’, ‘Pupille’, ‘Carnet’, thrown like stones at the door of the text, all effect a ‘break-in’. The waves of the sea might, Baudelairean-fashion, be an invitation au voyage, an outward pull ‘n’importe où hors du monde’1. They translate, however, into a form of writing (a parallel écriture) which, though derived from elsewhere (‘depuis la mer’), delve into the bodily layers of the verbalizing first person, prised open as victim. The pupil of the eye, commonly seen as window on the world and its etchings for luminous perception, switches tack to grope into the more secretive roundness (‘vers le cœur’) of the inner universe and its close-wrapped human feelings. ‘Carnet’, in its turn, first a literary object or item of stationery seen from outside, leads in a rapid sequence, in three stages, from what is printed as title to what figures as a sub-description on the cover, and then to what is housed in the depths, far less patent and decipherable: a descente aux enfers from ‘couverture’ to ‘intérieur’, and from overt statement to underground half-hints and ill-sustained hypotheses. Each of those three opening words also leads, past the brisure of the colon, into an encounter with the mirror and a lurch towards the abyss. In the case of ‘Vagues!’, the word leaps a gap, not simply away from the naturalistic domain (‘depuis la mer’) and into its translation as ‘écriture’, nor simply to invade that other naturalistic domain of the body as a sensual entity, but to possess that body as reconstituted ‘dans le miroir’: it, too, a translation of itself, virtual rather than real, already en abyme. The case of ‘Pupille’ is all the more complex. For, while gouging its way similarly to the physical heart of things, it becomes lured (as the syntax proliferates) into the deceptive density of language (‘…le cœur / avec son sauvage épineux homonyme’). The heart becomes both visceral and literary. And the ‘pupille’, at first 1

Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, p.303.

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alone as a single identity, is enlisted in a play of words and doubles: twinned indeed with its homonym ‘prunelle’, which itself parts as double meaning (as a split image in the mirror) between ‘eye-ball’ and ‘sloe’ or wild plum, fruit of the blackthorn. So, that uncomfortable thickness on the edge of obscurity pertains not only to thornbush but also to language, the two as one, caught in the same distorting glass. It is also the medium which causes ‘pupille’ and ‘prunelle’ to adhere as reflections of the same, though shading off into the creative raggedness of difference. The initiating force of ‘Carnet’ also projects one in its own way into the depths of a mirror. For, just as ‘Pupille’, foraging inwards to become more inner eye and exploratory instrument than visual organ, there veers into an image of itself as an accident (or magnetic coincidence) of words, a literary ‘optical illusion’ between sameness and otherness, so the ‘Carnet’, as one ventures from the sparseness of the cover to the profuseness of the inner folds, from its status as text to its existence as texture, finds itself twinned with a double: the poet’s own literary ‘jottings’, taking shape as an exercise in verbal time like itself, at first tentative and then gaining ‘body’ as time accumulates or elapses, not knowing what it will retain, how it will evolve or what in the end, as a forward-reaching act in the dark, it will signify. A ‘Carnet’, therefore, which, as it opens on itself, draws with it, perfectly yet imperfectly mirrored (because in a different time), a conjunctive literary enterprise, clinging like a second skin as it seeks to ‘re-present’ the original: the two as close to each other as ‘pupille’ and ‘prunelle’, corresponding eyes in potential, though separated by a literary membrane which makes their commerce a conjuring-act of words and impedes the identity of a single vision. The words ‘En papier recyclé’ apply, therefore, not just to the material fabrication of the carnet, but to the present poem in its re-use of time (and of materials once jettisoned brought back into circulation), as well as to the page that one has currently in one’s hands. As the act of writing delves into its double (and progressively becomes that double), the journey into the mirror does not ensure greater illumination, but a descent into layers of obscurity: that underlying darkness without which the reflective capture would not, in the first instance, have been possible. Énigmatiques problematizes the question of textual advance. A poem beginning, ‘Pendant que tu dors je me penche / sur la profondeur de ton sang’ (E, p.30), where the literary threshold and the verge of penetration into the density of

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another intimacy are as one, then moves on (in a succession of thresholds) to find itself poised on the edge of a linguistic ‘between-ness’: Pareils maintenant au seuil des énigmes nous nous parlons avec d’anciens signaux masculin, féminin.

What could be a subtler description of the relationship with the carnet: a unifying intent and potential oneness of spirit, but marred perhaps and led to question itself by a gulf in time, a communicative décalage, stemming not only from linguistic variance but an unresolved superimposition of sexual emphases or prerogatives? Another poem starts with the words: Compagne des oiseaux, sais-je où tu vas, main solitaire, écrivante, laveuse, et pourtant infidèle aux travaux de la vie? (E, p.27).

It casts doubts over the direction of the writing hand, a volatile creature given to capricious patterns of migration, an unsettled servant of the in-between: ill-fitted for the utilitarian demands of life but unsure of its destinations, attached to the questioning subject but pulled to alien horizons of its own. More significantly no doubt, the literary act (or the utterance of poetry, no matter how inspired) is seen to decompose as it composes. Hence this image, reflective of any effort to keep a faithful diary, of the material text which saves and corrodes at the same time: ‘les papiers délités qui sentent l’acide’ (E, p.24). For the writer is a medium of unretainable things, of sparse intuitions and incomplete parts which fail to find correspondences in words, dislodging velléités of expression en route but spilling them: Un dieu murmure à travers ta gorge cette poussière imprononçable… (E, p.18).

What, then, is the content of this ‘Carnet’? For what appears on the cover or title-page is a pre-text: an indicator of what might feature inside, hinting at a certain bias perhaps, but little more than a label. It is notable that the phrases reproduced in inverted commas – that is, ‘saved’ in a linguistic precinct as authentic citations from the original, however peripheral – are the only ones in the entire poem to

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benefit from this status. As the writer slips into the privacy of another writer (and so from the comparative security of one identity into the receptive void of a semi-relinquished one and the indeterminacies of another), that firmness of contour, that sufficiency and pithiness of the ready-made phrase (with its ternary fullness), are left behind. Once inside (‘A l’intérieur…’), the linguistic archaeologist uncovers layer upon layer of largely unsifted material, unselective inventories, curtailed jottings, crossed-out details of what may or may not have taken place, the hurried bric-à-brac of the everyday. Boundaries are no longer clear. Things run together, or race away in uncoordinated sequences. Signposts point to unattainable lost destinations, scattered to the winds with no compass, an existential inchoateness contemplated second-hand, already obsolete. The material expands and sprawls, only to contract and trickle away to almost nothing: leaving the thin voice of what was stifled to near-silence: the sublanguage of a lived present wrapped in the flesh of days but strangely divorced from all tangible or recoverable reality and henceforth prevented from holding its place in the realm of ‘direct speech’. Does one, then, in this shapeless, jostling third paragraph – the very centre of Bancquart’s poetic text and at the heart of the foreign text that has sucked it in – touch on the truth of the final words of a piece from Mémoire d’abolie (a title germane to the catalogue of obliterations which is this carnet): Dedans C’est illettré (MA, p.45)?

For, one has passed from the world of ‘letters’ in the form of readable words in inverted commas, to what remains, even though Kafka is mentioned and these are the annotations of a literate and literary consciousness, in several senses ‘illiterate’. Not one word of those ‘notes’ actually appears on the page, nothing is quoted verbatim, not a single letter of the variegated text impinges ‘live’ on our reading. That reading remains bodiless: in its own way (and via another mise en abyme) ‘muette’ to one’s reading ears and eyes, and in the digestive brain of inquisitive late-comers. That does not mean, however, that the preliminary inscriptions ‘Sauvegardons les ours!’ and ‘En papier recyclé’ lie stranded and irrelevant as the text opens its trapdoor into linguistic and syntactical free fall. On the contrary, the ecological ambition to save life-forms is

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a reminder, as the poem progresses, that man also is an endangered species, threatened in different ways with extinction. The slogan is a profession de foi, a laudable show of conviction (to be undermined ironically in the course of words) purporting to preserve and have some arresting effect, via the efficacy of the written word, on the patterns of nature, their appearance and disappearance, their increasing and diminishing assets, their perishable matter. It also raises the question of writing for a cause, of a literary project having a clear link with purpose: so indicating the discrepancy between a puny notebook, with its casual entries made in the cocoon of one person’s self-regard, and the grandeur of global themes. The same applies to the linking of ‘Sauvegardons…’ and ‘En papier’ which underlines the ill-matched nature of ends and means: the former aimed at the unitary and enduring, the latter marked by the porous, fragile and (bio) degradable. Indeed, the phrase ‘En papier recyclé’ holds a mirror, not only to the present textual endeavour to ‘re-play’ on renewed paper what was formerly written in a different note-book, so in a sense defying time by saving the textual material from its once-only extinction; but to the nature of poetry and its multi-layered, palimpsestic recurrence, rotating in time, re-using itself, selfregenerative. The whole collection Enigmatiques leaks inwards from its peripheries through that vacancy in the text which is the fatefully understated word, ‘muette’. The relationship between the part and the whole (or the part and the hole), as well as between the centre and the margins, plays a crucial part in the literary dilemma. A poem preceding ‘Carnet’, for instance, is drawn similarly into the debate on the unsolved encounter between text and time. It is set in a place of books, a literary depository which, by definition, puts on show the inscriptions of not one, but innumerable covers. But, just as a text has recto and verso, or in the case to be quoted a diurnal and a nocturnal world, a reality of the eye as well as that of dream, so there is a classified order of things (like a Dewey decimal system or the day-to-day accountancy of calendars which enable one to ‘find one’s place’ and step to and fro with equanimity) and the far less measurable overspills of time: Dans une bibliothèque, à la lumière, tu rêves au calendrier gaulois qui comptait de la nuit à la nuit, comme on dit:

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As in ‘Carnet’, moreover, beyond the words in quotation-marks (with their maxim-like enclosure and security of the commonplace), time as actual experience rather than pseudo-philosophical statement proceeds (through various spatial equivalents) to disintegrate in disorder, wisps, disoriented fragments and floating parcels: dans le désordre du voyage le vent respire sans direction non plus vers des îles posées sur l’abîme (E, p.19).

Is the evocation of islands dotted on the abyss a reflection of the precarious diaspora, the classified but directionless archipelago evoked in ‘Carnet’ by the uncoordinated syntax of the phrase ‘…listes raturées, rendez-vous, courses, adresses’? For these are disseminated dots on a sea of time: records of movements and halting-places, improvised disembarkations and re-departures, in a person’s bottomless temporal existence. So, the speaker of the same poem continues: ‘Tu sautes de l’une à l’autre, avec ta meute d’heures’, just as in ‘Carnet’ each poorly anchored notation resembles a steppingstone in the shifting currents of a stranger’s time, now recrossed by an explorer flanked by her own time as if by a pack of hunting-dogs, which sniff out the quarry, retrace steps, trying to unearth the posthumous. Elsewhere in Enigmatiques, at the crux of a poem, one reads: Le temps bat et sépare (E, p.34).

The contents of the anonymous carnet, in their windswept patterns, illustrate that truth. Though intended methodically to track time and reproduce its latent coherence, they are winnowed by it, broken into bits and sifted. Perhaps in the slip from exterior to interior, and as perception moves from cover to contents, there is no option but towards greater fragmentation. The pivotal lines of another text – ‘Nulle route / que vers le dedans’ (E, p.33) – are then followed by this concluding sequence: Fragmente, atteins le centre immerge ton miroir.

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Un rythme naît plein de faille, pour ta scansion plénière.

The entry into the carnet follows such a pattern. As that mirror (in the form of writing held up to another mode of writing and an empathetic project sounding a shared identity) becomes immersed, and as broaching the centre becomes synonymous with brisure rather than encirclement or containment, one senses the stirrings of a rhythm fluttering in the pages, a ‘life-pulse’ which tends to foreshadow some fullness of being (that of original writer and of the literary traveller pulled into his or her wake), but a rhythm riddled with blanks and missing pieces. A rhythm, indeed, reflecting tempos of life and patterns of time, but time still not stabilized or given continuity, despite being confined in a notebook and consigned to the fixity of the page. The final lines of a poem which has the form of a cryptic question-and-answer session, laconic rather than sprawling but in its own way ‘plein de faille’ and half-unpicked with conjecture, read: Qui bat? – La vie contradictoire au pouls éclaté (E, p.38).

In the inner folds (or entrails) of the carnet, the irregular beat or ‘burst pulse’ of the floating linguistic corpuscles reflects just such a ‘vie contradictoire’, porous with paradox, impossible to bring to order. A quatrain from Enigmatiques shows emphatically how time, working its metamorphoses in the depths of the human, inflicts its ravages on words and their chances for cohesion and self-justification: Le temps a fait son chemin dans les os. Les mots tremblent. Incertitude. Ils se défont. Les lettres s’en retournent éparses pour les insomnies, les énigmes, les cris (E, p.54).

What better definition of the diary itself: a place of undoings and shaky relationships, slippery footholds, inarticulate and disarticulated tokens, tremulous would-bes, a dotted sign-language of blurted bits and unquiet fragments? No sooner has one pierced its inner chamber than a glimpse of the word ‘love’ appears. Even the parallel positioning in successive

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lines of ‘l’intérieur’ and ‘l’amour’ suggests a pairing, as if that intimacy and its haven of words went hand in hand with the priority which is love. The word, however, is a mere wisp, carried for a moment and left behind in the short-lived ripples of the extemporized text sketchily replicated here. It is picked up later, beyond a hollow in which the thread of language virtually vanishes, by ‘n’aime rien tant que…’ (as if noun and verb were signalling to each other, though attached to essentially incompatible partners). The idea of love lingers residually in the words ‘rendez-vous’ and ‘Rencontres’, as it does in the reference to ‘corps jamais les mêmes’. The noun ‘l’amour’ has already faded, however, especially as a promise of ‘coming together’, amidst such less trustworthy offspring, associated with casual encounters, fickle exits and entrances, and temporary halts. Frustrating expectations, love seems to slip from any detectable human correspondent in the course of the writing and side-step its object. The poem before ‘Carnet’ contains the words: ‘Ah! que l’amour puisse sortir d’une seconde…’ (E, p.20). Here, too, one would like it to emerge decisively from not one, but from all the recorded seconds of time gathered in that notebook. One would like to tease it out, enlarge it from the one meagre jotting. But the words, in the recording, are its obscurity and near-erasure. Is it surprising that a flower exists called ‘love-in-a-mist’? An earlier text speaks of ‘le vent qu’on ne voit pas / sous l’oiseau / sous l’amour’ (E, p.12). An invisible wind (of space and time) contrives to undermine love and carry it like a feather – or, in terms of the present poem, like a note in the air, not held for long before its departure. ‘Je vous aime trop maintenant, figures blessures’ (E, p.51), says the poet. The writing of the carnet is in ‘figures blessures’, as is the report of that writing to us, readers at several removes. For, if a wound is open, unassuaged, so are the figures of speech, syntax, style (and the faces to be deciphered from them). So, too, is love: all the more loved, no doubt, for its dereliction and painful incompleteness among other forms of raggedness. That the only love mentioned in these jottings should be for a sound – that of a bell-note – is not irrelevant. (Does it come as solace, perhaps as a more faithful communicant, into the solitude of a listener’s room?) That it never finds or embraces a human person yet claims priority in this summary of a life adds more poignancy to this flare launched by the poet, as aftermath, into the revealing yet unrevealing verbal enclave of another. What other loves might there

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have been, less deserving of record (or note)? It is significant, too, that, in a world of brushed surfaces and thin contacts, this bell-note has been penetrating. It has entered the correspondent’s world with a unique intensity, just as, by a mise en abyme in time and space, the poet (as another expression of sound) has been moved to go through the cover to pursue her richer soundings ‘à l’intérieur’. Yet that key sound is not a harmony or a symphony. It is a single note (‘en fa dièse’), strangely stranded, without accompaniment, soon to be transported in a flow of utilitarian daily reminders (‘listes raturées, rendez-vous, courses, adresses’), as if with no lasting reverberation. So, the note becomes more nostalgia than possession: a resonance harking more to what is missing than a music to soothe the soul. Elusive music runs through Bancquart’s poetry, galvanizing it while accentuating its precious voids. ‘La musique savante manque à notre désir’2, writes Rimbaud in Conte, narrating the pursuit of impossible relationships beyond the clutch of words. A fragmentary note in Baudelaire’s own Journal reads: ‘La Musique creuse le ciel’3. Enigmatiques journeys broadly in their wake. One poem reaches the realization: C’est en fermant les yeux qu’on soupçonne inaudible majeure une musique dans le corps, vertige… (E, p.42).

‘Carnet’ proposes the same ‘divination’: the intuition of a distant music, sensed by a second listener approaching in the dark. A music not so much ‘dans le corps’ as ‘dans le corps du texte’, resounding within its scrolls by a mazy pathway through which it induces its own ‘vertige’. The same poem continues, haunted by whisperings from beyond the grave audible only to the most attentive (should one say fanciful and deluded?) ear: Le cerne absent du son laisse sur la momie trace d’un règne.

Does one detect here echoes, distorted in the atmospherics of the twentieth century climate, of a Mallarméan paradox: that of the 2 3

Œuvres complètes, p.125. Œuvres complètes, p.1251.

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unidentifiable bird soaring into nothingness on a single note, in a crucifixion of voice and silence and ‘par nul écho suivi’, ‘L’oiseau qu’on n’ouït jamais / Une autre fois dans la vie’? Or that of the ‘creux néant musicien’ within which a mandora, as bulging womb and empty chamber, enacts its destiny as ‘musicienne du silence’4? If one sees in such tensions the symptom of poetry, and of language generally, torn at the threshold of its own expression by the awareness of an inaccessible sound which taunts all verbal approaches with its lure of perfection, then ‘Carnet’ is not immune. For, in the lines just quoted which rustle by in Enigmatiques, the ‘musique’, though ‘majeure’, is ‘inaudible’ (inaudible because major); just as the sound is hedged by absence and leaves its print while evading contour. Might one then not see the poem ‘Carnet’ as evoking in its own way, albeit cursorily, the lure of that missing music: a music from afar, which desire espouses (or has espoused) more fervently than any human loves, but which only makes its mark as an absent outline of a sound, a ‘trace on the mummy’ (a former life bound in its bands of words in the hope of outliving time)? In the counterpoint of sound and silence, of potential music and arrest, the ‘amour d’une pénétrante cloche en fa dièse’, briefly heard, soon gives way in the hierarchy of things to the quelling influence of the adjective ‘muette’. It is even more notable that what began, with the opening of the cover, as a relative profusion of notations spreading across the page, soon shrinks to the one word ‘muette’, a hollow at the textual heart, almost a verbal void. It is not the only example of crucial ‘stanzas’ which recede in the centre, to become the thinnest of connections, a nearly broken hinge, as in: L’homme bêche, s’entête, bricole, classe plantes et anges et sans embarras finit par appeler Dieu, qui descend en colline chaude (E, p.52).

The word ‘et’ here is the eye of the needle. It is the tightest passageway between man’s arduous labours, patchy do-it-yourself work and incongruous classifications between different orders, and on the other hand the aspiration (perhaps too naïve) to be on familiar terms with some vaster pattern of things reigning over all. ‘Carnet’ is not 4

Œuvres complètes, pp.66, 74, 54.

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dissimilar. The word ‘muette’, placed virtually at the centre, is the poem’s gullet. It is almost literally a ‘bottleneck’, representing not only the hazardous straits between communication and noncommunication, but also the ‘squeeze’ of destiny, coming as if to stifle words as a reminder that destiny, by its nature, has no vested interest in human designs to slow down and preserve, to consign to paper and transfer what they would like to think of as an inheritance. One reads, in another of the Enigmatiques: Au milieu de ces temps, au centre du tableau, Booz s’apprête à jeter une graine d’homme (E, p.40).

In ‘Carnet’, amidst many ‘times’ and in the middle of another form of ‘artistic’ endeavour, someone has thrown out a ‘graine d’homme’: a single seed of language, precariously self-contradictory – the adjective ‘muette’ being perhaps man’s succinct summary, a speck jettisoned into the unexpressed and the inexpressible, not knowing where it will fall or if it will ‘take’. Bancquart’s work is preoccupied by all that is quiet, unsaid, unsayable: ‘Je me tais […] Si nous restions muets comme les morts’ (E, p.51), says one poetic voice. The urge to understand muteness is relevant to the text in focus. For not only does it convey the secretiveness of that mute haste which is our lot, but shows itself as a comparatively ‘mute’ text itself, fashioned between the half-silence of the dead and that of the living which, meeting halfway, expire in a wishful sordino. That discreet recoil of the one-word ‘muette’ at the heart of things is a symptom of the soft erasure which is destiny. It is also a symptom of its speed: an operation performed covertly and almost unnoticed, a furtive but brief ‘passover’ among the scribblings of a life. It is the point where what was first fanfared with verbal confidence as a statement of intent and an enlistment of others in a common project (‘Sauvegardons les ours’) loses its tongue and retreats into the foretaste of a voiceless solitude. The word ‘furtive’, merging as a conspirator with ‘tapinois’, lurks in Enigmatiques: Respirer ne désespère plus quand on rejoint des ferveurs si furtives (E, p.44)

and l’intervalle nous sollicite,

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quotations relevant to ‘Carnet’. For that gap, the reverse suction of wordlessness in the text, becomes a veiled sollicitation. It is in its vicinity that one senses a hidden appeal and fervour: that which, in its near-silent withdrawal, seeks to be translated. So it might give cause, in the protracted reach towards ‘otherness’, for non-despair. The furtive, though, is ambivalence and abeyance. It is an in-between-ness, a neither here nor there. It hangs and wavers. It declines to show its hand. It is a reason for hope and despair. It gives on the one hand what it takes away (or occults) on the other. It is a favourite medium of destiny, which says nothing frank or patent, which bestows nothing unequivocally (or even vocally) once and for all. For, contrary to a view of destiny as inevitability and what is written for all eternity, it is, rather, the accident, the passage and the passing, and their accompanying set of directionless proof-corrections. Destiny’s grudging half-concealment appears in the phrase: ‘laisse apparaître un nom d’hôtel’. It is like a slip of the tongue, somewhat aléatoire, not quite intentional, but to divulge what? Life’s great tautology, perhaps, advancing only to be no further advanced: ‘un nom d’hôtel: Hôtel’. It is a formulation which raises the question of names and namelessness. For, just as ‘Hôtel’ refuses to define or decline itself, to emerge from the undifferentiated (or the realm of generic abstraction where God also promises but evades, offers havens but denies access), so the text evolves via an elusive anonymity. Another poem speaks of the ‘Passagers anonymes de l’existence’ (E, p.58). Such nameless travellers are amply in evidence here, though ‘amply’ rings hollow, such is their transient thinness and lack of substance. Who, for instance, is the writer of the carnet, the pages of which are now the rooms of a deserted house? With whom were the ‘rendez-vous’? To whom did the addresses belong? Who constituted the ‘rencontres’ and whose were the ‘corps jamais les mêmes’? And is Kafka, despite the enduring name, any closer to recognition than the word ‘L’Hôtel’? What is the import of those unrevealed notes on him, and what, if known, might they tell of the distant relationship verbally stitched between anonymous diary-writer and the celebrated author, passing like ships in the night, presumably unaware of each other’s existence? Indeed, one wonders how ‘propre’ is the proper name ‘Kafka’, that writer within a writer: ‘propre’ in both senses of ‘clean’ and ‘belonging to itself’. For that author, so concerned with questions

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of identity and the absurd, is here embroiled, despite the clarity of the name and its symbolic permanance, in the drift from ‘une personne’ (or its semblance) to ‘personne’, and vice versa: two movements simultaneously at work, evolution towards self and devolution from it, formation and deformation. Hence the name ‘Kafka’ locked finally in conjunction with the questioning ‘Qui va, qui vient?’. No name, in these circumstances, is adequate to fill and fulfil the question ‘Who?’. The shifty proclivities of destiny are echoed by the ‘contamination’, the slippage towards slyness and ambiguity, of language. What is one to think, in the liasse of three lines stretching from ‘destin’ to ‘Dieu’ affected as they are by brevity of appearances (‘laisse apparaître’) and the conditionality of times (‘comme on dirait’), of the phrase ‘l’Hôtel, / tout court’? For it can mean ‘The Hotel, and no more, Hotel purely and simply’, or (as a rejet running over into the ‘elsewhere’of another line) ‘everything hastens, everything runs away’. That second sense (in our reality of double meanings) supports the themes of ‘courses’ and endless running hither and thither, of the urgency of destiny to have things over and done with, of the suspect human to-and-fro implicit in ‘Qui va, qui vient?’, and of the transience which comes to desolidify (as ‘éphémères’) all that has seemed an acquisition, however loosely strung. In the destiny of va-et-vient, there can be only traces. ‘Peu de formes demeurent’ (E, p.26), one reads: whether this be the human form bound for deterioration and decomposition, that of human relationships laced with the arrival and departure of ‘corps jamais les mêmes’, that of the book ironically intended to save the forests but which is itself broken down and reconstituted ‘en papier recyclé’, or that, finally, of this particular text (either the original carnet or the poem held to it like tracing paper), both of which are inadequate and undernourished and are, in the composition, a form of decomposition. L’espace et l’homme s’effacent en tourbillon (E, p.37),

notes Bancquart. That movement towards erasure, affecting the space of human life and the space of the word on loan, is illustrated, not only by the force of the final ‘éphémères’ (made irreversible by the finality of the Past Historic ‘furent’ which runs counter to the purpose of a carnet with its renewable stream of immediate presents), but also by

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the drift into fricatives at the eleventh hour (‘Qui va, qui vient? Sauvegardons les ours / parmi ces vestiges, car les jours de Kafka furent éphémères’): like a half-breathed lifeline between preservation and loss, between future signs and past ruins, formed on the edge of the lips and fading from v to f , from a semblance of vibrancy to a more tremulous frisson. Another text from Enigmatiques begins, as if caught unawares and left speechless by life’s amalgam of outlines and erasure: Oui, stupéfaite par la vie ses épures sur sable (E, p.32).

The carnet, in the end, will have caused the same stupefaction: that such an intensity of life has only managed to sketch its ‘blueprints’ and fuzzy footmarks into slippages of sand. (Might that one-word bottleneck in the middle of the text be that of the hour-glass?). Nous transférons vos monuments vers les villes dissoutes (E, p.14).

Does not a diary, as an instrument of transmission, suffer the same fate? It feeds the dilemma of vestiges versus the ephemeral. In seeking to consign to history and raise a mini-monument of words to outlive the day, it consigns no less to ruin and dissolution. Hence the tension between ‘les voici en compact’, as if things were held together with a mutual density, and the indeterminate looseness of faceless comings and goings, sparse remnants and short-lived days. What, then, is left in the memory of such memorials? For when the hour-glass tips, one veers ‘du pesant à la presque absence: / ongle d’oiseau, mémoire de nuage’ (E, p.59). And all one’s accumulated weight is tantamount to finger-nail slivers and clouded reminiscences. What, indeed, becomes of us? ‘Un souvenir du pollen. Une trace de jaune extrême’ (E, p.32) is one answer: a few wind-borne particles snagged more in the mind than in reality, hankering for a fertilization now too abstract to take place, but leaving an aggravated coloured smear on the extreme edge of life and death, a yellowing left-over of what might have taken seed. Perhaps one can only deal with words in dots, as intermittent as rain-drops and as quick to evaporate and dry. Il pleut. Tu entends les mots résonner?

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is the tentative opening of one poem, a text which ends in a sort of blindness, or at best a sign-language for the blind, tactile but opaque: ‘Touche les mots, le braille du vivant’. Whether the experience of the carnet is more a contact with the living or the dead is arguable, but the exercise of reading its notes is certainly an act of feeling one’s way ‘de tache aveugle en tache aveugle’ (E, p.11). One is recurrently alerted, in these explorations, to the little that one sees of a life under the surface, whether one’s own or that of another person: Vous êtes conviés à boutonner vos yeux sur votre existence unique, insondable (E, p.14).

One is aware, similarly, of all that halts at the eyelids, and at the flickering eyelids of words. Nous feuilletons les archives d’anciens regards devenus enfants de l’hiver, au-delà des langues (E, p.22),

declares the text succeeding ‘Carnet’. This is precisely what the poet (and the reader in her wake) are doing: flicking through the pages of former ‘looks’ – not coherent enough to be called archives but an improvised storehouse nevertheless – looks now in the grip of cold, the product of a tilt of time from seasons of fruitfulness to that of relics and lost intimations of life under the deathliness. And we, like her, are searching for the words beyond that linguistic skeleton. The original writer, then, is the smudge of a presence. As we cling to the lifeline of our own day-to-day survival, we can only derive the slightest tastes of that passing ‘otherness’ (itself writing its existence by the day): Qui espère, sinon de vivre encore un jour, savourant ta présence mince? (E, p.23).

Throughout the diary-reading, there is a missing person. ‘Je vois les gens découpés en trous’ (E, p.41), says Bancquart. That person is not only the diarist, but the poet-interlocutor, just as illdetermined, chasing shadows after the event: two human persons cut out in ‘holes’, reaching in each other’s direction via their respective textual lacunae and missing parts. The ‘who goes there?’ haunts much of the poet’s work. It looms at the end of the text just quoted:

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[…] Vient toujours le carrefour de meurtre et de Qui vive? (E, p.41).

The tangle with the carnet is such a meeting-point: not only the crossroads of a self poised, by the very act of writing, between its own life and death, but the crossroads of two selves poised between each other, two anonymities beckoning each other from death and relegating each other to it, revealing and suppressing, extracting and re-burying the potential human identity. A particular poem of Enigmatiques acts as a suggestive companion-piece to ‘Carnet’. It concerns the spasmodic resurgence of ‘signs’ from a person no longer of this world, and the surprise of a human presence reaching out from absence, as if not resigned to being shelved in memory. That presence seems to speak from inside the pages of a book: not so much through the words, however, as via a stray finger-print left by the reader as a smear on the paper after touching her facial make-up, perhaps: Tu murmures: – Ouvre le livre à la marque d’un doigt la mienne. Regarde. Mêle nos empreintes. J’étais cette sueur légère plus forte que ma chair. Survivante. (E, p.25).

As in the case of the diary, it is a question of opening a book in order to come to terms with formless imprints outreaching the flesh: fingermarks of a life calling in belated desperation for the ‘intermingling’of signs, for the confusion (and small redemption) of two snippets of existence aspiring to transcend their respective solitudes. One cannot live with that disquieting presence for long, however. It is an importunate and ultimately irrecuperable stranger, due to be returned, how-ever tactile the encounter, to its unbreathable domain: Je la repince vivement entre les pages. Morte, reste dans l’infra-temps, sois pénombre, fugace. La vie déjà s’est arrangée sans toi (E, p.25).

The same applies to the writer of the carnet and, by a mise en abyme within that carnet, to Kafka. In a universe of eclipses, and however plaintive their ‘vestiges’, they have to be closed back into their ‘infra-

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temps’, restored to loss as it were, over that brink of days where the sound of the phrase ‘furent éphémères’ expires inevitably. The poet’s is an in-between world. ‘Quel entre-monde vivonsnous?’ (E, p.46) is a question which lurks nearby. Indeed, how many ‘inter-worlds’ conjoin in the ‘Carnet’ text? The carnet itself falls in a space and time ‘between’: between perennity and transience, between self-expression and self-betrayal, between the reality of lived experience and the shell of words, between the outward gesture and the tomb of self-enclosure. It also falls between self and other, between its own verbal expression and the relaying of that expression in the words of another ‘scriptor’ (but from over the horizon and with no guarantee that, even while ‘mingling their imprints’, the latter is reproducing faithfully the authenticity of the original). It falls somewhere between the je and the nous. That the poet can finally take the words quoted from the cover-page in inverted commas (‘Sauvegardons les ours!’) and appropriate them as a personalized statement belonging now to her own act of writing, uttered in the name of a ‘nous’ (‘Sauvegardons les ours / parmi ces vestiges’), speaks of a communicative porousness, of a transfer through the semipermeable membrane of poetry into another text, but does not disguise the fact that the person or persons brushed against must finally disappear into an irretrievable distance. ‘Ton œil a l’éloquence de l’entre-chaleur’ (E, p.39), one reads elsewhere. The encounter with the carnet is, in a sense, the meeting of two ‘non-eloquences’: on the one hand, the informal, abbreviated, desultory notations of the carnet itself; on the other, the loose, variable, unstructured probings of the poem, largely in free form and not brought to any degree of prosodic and syntactical formality or ‘finish’. And what that encounter produces, in the absence of a full-blooded eloquence from either party, is a ‘between-warmth’, the ‘mid-warmth’ of two bodies (both veiled in words) crossing in the night and picking up each other’s distant flush on a sensitive radar which catches components of a common code. ‘Qui va, qui vient?’: the words are equally applicable to the two writers. Who is moving towards the other, who is advancing or receding, who is making the entry or gravitating once more towards the exit, at any given moment? The theme is taken up with a different emphasis (E, p.27): et je suis ici, dans la chambre, entre deux bouffées de mémoire

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In the flesh of the text une enfance rongée, un avenir dont l’écrivain a signé la dérive.

The diary is a ‘room-between’, caught in the winds of memory. Its draughty space is traversed by gusts of an earlier life eaten away, disintegrating and departing, but also by the slight breeze of a future invested in that mode of writing which still wavers there, detached from authorship, as a piece of eccentric flotsam. The poem, equally, is a ‘room-between’: perhaps a casual ‘Hôtel’ such as that alluded to in the carnet, also without name or title and belonging to no brochure or category, which has sheltered various travellers under one roof for a few minutes of semi-obscurity without their coming to know each other in any depth, before they must move on into the changeability of new relationships. Je fais retraite dans un passage passager

(E, p.48),

says the textual voice of another Énigmatique. There are several ‘withdrawals’ in ‘Carnet’. They join in the last word ‘éphémères’. Kafka, the diarist, and the poet are all travelling through, not staying, not lasting. ‘Il devient danseur fou d’éphémère’ (E, p.50), says another text. Is this what we all become? It is certainly the fate, aggravated to the extreme, of any writer: not only a tight-rope walker and ‘figuretracer’ to no avail, armed with rhyme perhaps but with no redeeming reason, but also an overnight erasure, spinning his or her patterns all the more energetically or desperately over the page’s surface because of that disquieting prospect. The carnet and its belated literary accomplice embody a problem of language. Earlier one encountered the phrase ‘cette poussière imprononçable’ (E, p.18). One wonders, more widely, what words can do to hold together and cement the dispersing dots of a life (its braille). The dilemma is posed with a particular slant by this formula, daunting like a labour of Hercules: brader l’amont poudreux de notre vie en disant les mots ordinaires (E, p.24).

As an exercise of daily recording, the carnet is a temporary locus (a modest literary hotel?) of ordinary words: words which sell life short, fail to do justice, and can only offer their cut-price version of an earlier life (the upstream of our days) now more a dry and crumbling

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expanse than a continuing source. More than that, the diary is a place of blanks where, however hard it tries, it misses more than it captures. Fête blanche le hors-texte naît: le rien, l’avant-genèse (E, p.59),

one is told. The carnet may not be a ‘fête’, wedded as it is to the uneventful everyday. There is no epiphany here. But, in its meagre hopeful celebration of the inconclusive and what might have been, it is forever undermined, if not invalidated, by the insistence of the ‘horstexte’: all that the text fails to contain and retain, everything beyond it and in relation to which it is a largely redundant language – victim of that muteness which was there at its heart and is there at the periphery as the adjective ‘éphémères’ is sieved into silence, of that ‘beyondthe-words’ which is not a transcendence but an infinite lacune, indefinite overspill, nothingness, the before and aft of what is actually there, anchored minimally to the page.

LA VIE, LIEU-DIT

(1997)

Habitée par une tendresse Ce qu’on attend le moins dans mon corps, c’est bien moi l’infidèle à son pouls, l’endimanchée de son désir. Il reste quémandeur, les pieds nus, à la porte pendant que sur la table proprement mise je coupe des viandes, en un geste civilisé. Ce soir je prends chemin de lampes sourdes entre peau et la chair jardin d’innervations, rencontre de veinules, je m’y fraie un retour d’enfant prodigue. Je m’engage en moi. Je pointille mon lieu d’écorchée. Je glisse, gainée dans la forme des doigts, des orteils, intime enfin de mon terreau. Glose du sang. Cris de coqs en fièvre que ne puis-je mettre ma langue dans l’entre-temps, l’exclamer, comme on puise dans l’Océan le cœur de l’Océan!

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In the flesh of the text

*

Qui demeure en mon cœur, c’est le cheval cabré sur les glaces de sa fontaine, dans l’Observatoire de décembre. Jour de rigueur où je marchais devant son espérance obstinée pendant que les morts amis se pressaient en moi debout, et me tenaient droite afin de leur offrir des années, une voix.

*

Contre le tronc du marronnier la femme sent des paroles muettes qui circulent dans ses entrailles. De ses doigts étalés elle caresse en correspondants souterrains les racines touchant les morts et la semence à la menthe des ancêtres humecte ses paumes, escalade heureuse des disparus.

*

À l’intérieur de sa robe notre peau salue la pellicule de la terre. De temps inverses, va, la peau,

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remonte au cerf transpercé des cavernes l’an moins dix-huit mille remonte aux mains un peu moites, enduites d’ocre qui marquent la paroi du moins trente mille: déjà des mains de femme sapiens, habiles à pétrir la pâte, caresser un ventre fragile. Tu repars vers ton siècle tout ce que tu sais à present c’est appuyer tes mains contre le visage et devenir une égale de terre: succulence secret.

*

Figurez-vous mes os se sont emmêlés aux racines la terre substitue à la chair de mon corps une glèbe pleine de graines. Figurez-vous ma tête et la courbure d’horizon se confondent. Je vous souris de mon intimité qui s’imbibe au monde je souris comme

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In the flesh of the text

une potée de primevères.

*

Creux du bras, le sang palpite bleu, c’est brume sur les collines de Florence. Le poignet bat. Ressac du coude. C’était le bras aimé, poussière de rencontre, un matin de jadis, la peau de loin. Béatrice, une trace mystérieuse. Je glace mon corps de parfum, pour moi seule, et l’habille de couleur violente. Chaque respiration fait pénétrer en moi, brillante encore, une Florence rouge. Son écume mal ressuyée fait lueur d’aujourd’hui, dans l’herbe des bronches.

*

Braise, que ne puis-je marcher sur toi, disant avec l’eau fraîche ta noce proche, à l’aube? Glace, que ne puis-je te joncher d’ardents géraniums? Mais l’entre-couleur de la rose, la cendre des brumes tel est notre domaine, et les grains de la vigne-vierge tombent un par un sur les feuilles.

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J’écris l’odeur humide, où les morts éclosent en passeroses et pommiers. Jardinière je pose mes doigts sur leur face. Tu es seule dans chacun de tes doigts découpé sur l’air étroitement et l’ombre ne saura te faire commune comme avant ta naissance. L’envers de l’être sera encore ce défaut dans l’inexistence.

*

Il est des lettres à la signature indécise tout un arrière-temps passé dans nos poumons, nos veines qu’on ne retrouve pas dans le tiroir. Nous nous rappelons seulement un branle du cœur, un malaise, ou moins: ce reflet de vitre refermée par une lumière semblable, un matin, et la mémoire de vivre, toute nue, nous saisit sans personne, sans lieu, sans nous, comme une poussée de l’espèce: un homme foisonnant, qui se répète en homme.

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In the flesh of the text

*

Où rejoindre cette étoile battante, mon cœur? Y demeurer parmi les poumons, ces éponges plus petites qu’on croit, dans le filet des artères majeures? Muqueuses de velours rose passé, testaments de Villon, allegrettos, villes parcourues, chambres d’amour, où les claquemurer dans notre destin qui respire?

*

Je ne vois pas une ouverture dans le ciel autrement que par vide en moi qui appelle. Mais je trace parfois l’orbe d’un œuf bien fermé autour du monde savoureux dont je proclame baies, bouvreuils, baisers.

*

La chaleur autour de la main prend en gelée solaire. Nudité presque nulle la fontaine reflète des colonnes

La Vie, lieu-dit

où se glisse en odeurs un empire défait. Nous ne trouvons ici que traces d’une absence à la bouche à peine avivée. Notre mémoire devient le sable blanc du fond, qui témoigne.

193

What can one expect to find within that life-space which is the body? Strange feelings softer than the shell, perhaps. Surprise occupants whose terms of tenancy need to be renegotiated on an ad hoc basis at every twist and turn. Enigmatic urges and inarticulate voices which are an embryonic poetry, ever-nascent child, uncertain of its forms though destined for a life outside, emerging and receding with a vigour threatening to outreach the confines (and the comprehension) of the container. Bancquart’s work is marked, if not by the duality (for things are often less simple), then by oppositional tensions, of self. It is as if one were called to exist simultaneously on two planes or move in different dimensions at once, largely incompatible with each other’s priorities On occasions the traveller sees a relinquished self as mere shadow, so remote as to seem dematerialized and almost irrelevant, as in this dance of doubles: D’autre fois c’est mon ombre que j’aperçois séparée, se promenant sur terre (moi suspendue au parachute, en l’air pour toujours). L’ombre sans corps collé à elle s’éloigne en épelant enfin ses objets de mémoire vers l’horizon qui n’est plus mien (VLD, pp.44-45).

The outcome is an exclamatory relief to be liberated from halters and harnesses, to be ‘freed at the mouth’, as one’s own divorcee, enlarged and acquisitive: Ah, démuselée, seule à être seule, comme tu es superbe, sur les routes de ta soif, ma divorcée d’avec moi-même! (VLD, p.45).

Habitée par une tendresse finds its impetus in discrepancy: between a visible persona and its covert self, between expectations and an unlikely truth, between the outline taken to define the whole and a secret entity more extensive and authentic than that whole. The text owes its propulsion to such a resistance to reduction and enclosure. It is the force of non-expectation which drives it to explore itself. So, that self, the recognition of which is crayonned in the phrase

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‘c’est bien moi’, as if registering it took time to sink in, is simultaneously that of the speaker and that of the text as stimulated transgression. The irony of the echo of ‘moins…moi’ is to set in counterpoise what is seen as lesser and sidelined as virtually non-existent, and the affirmation, now spotlighted, of what is of overriding significance. The ‘moi’ is extracted, as it were, from the gangue of glib public judgments, to acquire its own sharper aura. That the ‘moi’ in question is a misfit and rebel emerges from its descriptions as ‘l’infidèle à son pouls’, breaking allegiance with dictated tempos and cultivating, like poetry, a rhythm against the grain; and as ‘l’endimanchée de son désir’, stitched into a ‘Sunday-best’ while a pool of inner energy protests against the starch of ritual. It is also a ‘moi’ of the threshold, depicted ‘à la porte’ between outer and inner, between routine conduct and the less civilized urges of the exclu, between security of possession and a disturbed hinterland of non-possession, between order and an ‘otherness’ which nags at the gates. It hovers at the margins of self-recognition: on the one hand going through the motions of dutiful role-play (‘je coupe des viandes, en un geste civilisé’), while on the other contemplating such gestures like a somnabulist, as if belonging to a foreigner. It is a self which is in a sense an ‘undressed’ thing (‘les pieds nus’), with unspoken needs (but which, one assumes, have little in common with the daily round of culinary satisfactions), and scant sympathy for the ethos of the ‘endimanchée’. The ‘table proprement mise’ is emblematic. It stands for a world arranged for social compatibility, with everything in place and no false notes. In its rectangular space, no less than in the corset of Sunday dress, the unruliness of classless desires can be held within the ‘straight and narrow’. In Si charnus dans l’intraduisible (VLD, p.51), Bancquart again stresses the opposition between some dubious brew absorbed in private and the sociability of sitting at table with others, between infusions of a dream zone and the waking world of communal parleys: et nous buvons cet élixir obscur sans savoir quand au réveil nous nous mettons à table avec le monde.

A text by Frénaud entitled Séparé casts reflections on this facet of inspiration:

197

La Vie, lieu-dit Regards qui m’accueillez en vain, je ne suis pas des vôtres, assis à votre table, partageant le pain et le vin.

And in a final line of blunt self-diagnosis which chimes uncannily with the phrase ‘ma divorcée d’avec moi-même’, he adds: Je vais ouvrir mon secret, hommes assis: Je me suis inacceptable1.

The triplet of three-line forays which ensues in the text, in a self-corroborating 3 x 3 structure, is a mobilization of resources in an alternative direction (‘je prends chemin…’): a thrust towards the prospects of a route between (‘entre peau et la chair’), into the ‘interval’, into the tight strata of self which give unexpected room for movement. Bancquart’s work is rich with nightfall departures. Here it is the phrase ‘Ce soir’, acting as switch, which disconnects from schooled behaviour and leads into the reaches of a relative obscurity (‘Je prends chemin de lampes sourdes’). In the transition from outsider to insider, what is discovered is not a dinner-table thinness of sliced meats but the savour of a ‘chair’ closer to home, of more complex texture. For, as one tips over the edge of the word ‘chair’, it takes on a protean lushness: a density of networks and growth patterns to which the exclue returns as if to a homeland. It is a different kind of ‘return from the desert’: not to the fatted calf and reconciliation with the father, but to a flesh of other origins, a more diverse native habitat. It is an intensely visceral engagement, a delving into the passages, surprise crossroads and signal-centres of the nerves and veins (‘jardin d’innervations, rencontre de veinules’). A further section of La vie, lieu dit, stressing the inescapably ‘fleshly’ nature of even one’s remotest attempted ‘translations’, is titled Si charnus dans l’intraduisible. The veins are remarkably capacious in this poetry. ‘Des avenues s’ouvrent dans les veines, marchables’ (VLD, p.45), one reads. It is as if the ‘lines’, the life-transporting weave, of writing and arteries were potentially one: Le crayon laissé tout seul sur la page écrit l’or qui double nos figures: lacis de veinules, chair striée (VLD, p.52). 1

In Les Rois Mages, ‘Poésie’, Gallimard, 1977, p.34.

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So much so that the momentum and flux of what is perceived to stir in the world at large seems to have its origins, its necessary motive source, in the liquid throb of what shifts deep within: Humidité sans fin de la mer sous la pluie de la pluie sur la mer, traversée par un vol de colombes mouillées, qui nichaient dans nos veines (VLD, p.67).

The poet is pioneer and map-maker of the innermost territories. She is map-maker and text-maker of the blood: reader and writer of its half-understood energies, its routes and messages. But though able to speak of ‘mon lieu’ and of being ‘intime enfin de mon terreau’, as if at last firmly chez elle, that ‘lieu’ is a place of tentative contours, as the verb ‘pointiller’ (to mark only in dots and broken lines) suggests. Nor is it a place of easy access. The vocabulary accentuates arduous contact (‘je m’y fraie un retour’), determined confrontation (‘J’engage en moi’), and the damaging friction of identity disputed by its doubles (‘mon lieu d’écorchée’). The consonantal density of ‘jardin d’innervations… je m’y fraie… d’enfant prodigue…’ is a thickener in the text, reflecting resistant advance; while the self-regenerating form of ‘je prends chemin… je m’y fraie… Je m’engage… Je pointille… Je glisse…’, where the je releases each time a new verb of action, shows not just perseverance in the face of what does not yield easily, but a stage-by-stage, piecemeal exploration of which the text is the immediate, ductile translation. Might one see the poetic form as being in its own way ‘pointillée’? For it is a discontinuous line, broken into abbreviated tercets with gaps: tentative ‘dots’ marking the directions of a ‘crossing’. Even the final movement ‘Je glisse’ which (especially after the wounded tensions of ‘d’écorchée’) might seem to attain a less painful fluidity, stays bound in the tight-fitting fabric of flesh (‘gainée dans la forme des doigts, des orteils’) at the extremities of which it stretches, as if testing the limits. From ‘glisse’ to ‘Glose’: the meaning of ‘glisse’ becomes realized as part of the text’s dynamic. It prompts a linguistic slippage, a tenuous phonetic transfer from one phase to the next. It is a threshold. The repetitive structure of subject and verb gives way to noun-phrases standing in their own right, autonomous, unattributable. One is newly sensitive to language: not only in that unexpected

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juggling of letters which sparks a change of rhythm in the text, but also in the close pairing of two forms of linguistic expression (the more self-conscious annotations of literary gloss, applied unexpectedly to the ‘text’ of the blood, and the less rational cry from instinctive animal depths). What the inner reading of the blood reveals inseparably is an outcry of desire. Desire as a force of awakening: ‘Ô vive lui, chaque fois / Que chante son coq gaulois’2, Rimbaud exclaims in verses caught between envie tensely wound and envie abolished. It is a burning force (‘en fièvre’) which raises temperatures and accelerates the tempo of ‘l’infidèle à son pouls’. The vigour injected here by the curtailing of verbs adds a strident edge to such ‘cries’, not channelled towards any specific action but which are there, pent up, ready for expenditure. It is apt that the mention of cries, sprung from another source and audible in the distances where blood is at its most obscure, should lead, as if by transference, to a direct verbal cry by the poet: ‘que ne puis-je mettre ma langue…’, so bringing this movement to its avid finale. It is an outburst of desire still fired by contradictions. For the ‘tongue’, though finding outlet and given voice, does so only to express its inability to break beyond. It is a ‘schizophrenic’ tongue, both sensual and abstract: a sexual organ ready to lunge into a liquid abyss, and utterance aspiring to the ‘gift of tongues’. Physical penetration and linguistic breakthrough have not quite joined, impeded in their own way by the discrepancies of an ‘entre-temps’. So, ‘mettre ma langue’ and ‘l’exclamer’ still appear as a divided function, seeking the partnership, in one capture, of erotic tongue and aesthetic voice. The poem is an exploration of ‘betweens’. The initial route ‘entre peau et la chair’, stretching inner space, connects with the complementary ambition: to broach ‘l’entre-temps’ and wider avenues between times. Opportunities of access glimmer through these texts. They may resemble clefts in a unified surface, or the jutting irregularity which snags the passer-by to disrupt his usual ‘time’, as in: Il s’accroche à une saillie d’entre-siècles sur le trottoir.

2

Œuvres complètes, p.88.

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In the flesh of the text Il pense au ventre d’origine (VLD, p.17).

The mental lurch from a tempting ‘entre-siècles’ to the ‘ventre d’origine’ echoes that in Habitée par une tendresse from the seductive depths of ‘entre-temps’ to the urge to draw from the well of ‘l’Océan’. The overlap of sounds, launched by the confluence of ‘glisse… Glose’ and their embryonic linguistic conciliation, continues in ‘que ne puisje… comme on puise’. It suggests a linguistic ‘entre-monde’ flexing the voice, a transitional ‘unfreezing’ preparing the conditions for the perfect rhyme (as yet only in simile-form, ‘comme on puise…’) which is ‘l’Océan… l’Océan’. That notional consonance (‘comme on puise dans l’Océan le cœur de l’Océan!’) would be the meeting-point of what are called ‘les routes de ta soif’ (VLD, p.45). It evokes an encircling infinity (the ‘O’ as Omega, the circle joining itself, a rounded universe without breaks or ‘lignes pointillées’). It is the coincidence by which the self is both infinitely contained and the infinite container. Baudelaire’s La Chevelure stirs a similar poetic resonance (energized by a volitional future): Je plongerai ma tête amoureuse d’ivresse Dans ce noir océan où l’autre est enfermé3,

where ocean joins ocean, the greater enclosed in the lesser as faultless replica and the lesser infinitely expanded into its metaphorical double. * The poem disguises its own continuity. It is not a logic of the intellect that moves it but more an intellect of the blood. In tracking its tortuous ways one advances by impulse, detour, interruption, ricochet and intermittent signs. That itinerary, too, one lights with one’s own ‘lampes sourdes’. One applies a ‘critique pointillée’: tracings of dotted or broken lines, piecing together the ‘glose’ of a circulation too complex to fathom. The second part of the text, still a ‘rencontre de veinules’, follows a tangent but remains interlaced. Where does one locate its links and conduits of communication? At a superficial level, there is the persistence of the noun ‘cœur’, passed across the gap from ‘cœur 3

Œuvres complètes, p.25.

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de l’Océan’ to ‘mon cœur’, as if courting likenesses between macrocosm and microcosm. Beyond that one word, however, there is a burgeoning image: that of the ‘fontaine’ with its leitmotif of water from below. The fact that it is a frozen fountain replays the theme, crystallized in a detail from memory, of sources out of reach, beyond the tongue. It is only a step to see the statue of a rearing horse (in bronze at the heart of the fountain) as an objective correlative, and as a visualisation of withheld desire, of that wilder energy which bubbles inside ‘l’endimanchée de son désir’. At a more delicate level, this section takes its cue from the word ‘l’entre-temps’. For not only does it shape the metaphor of energy snorting for release but, as an act of memory harking back to a specific day (‘Jour de rigueur’) which has itself survived the years (‘Ce qui demeure en mon cœur…’), it forms a living example of an ‘entre-temps’ active in the text. On the one hand, time (as a December frost) is arrested, yet to be freed. On the other, a precise memory within that grip contradictorily forges its way to the surface as proof of passage, and as a thrust of moral reinforcement (‘espérance obstinée’) plucked from the mirror of that ‘cheval cabré’. So, in this text of unsure encounters, the tensions of restriction and desire, of immobility and potential movement, join with what clings and what departs, of what is sealed in time and what still travels its unreliable shuttle. In the process, a spatial image (of fountain and sculpted form in a named location in Paris) expands to encompass a vaster temporal dimension. The ‘cheval cabré sur les glaces de la fontaine’, just as it is both visible object and a force working deep in the well of the mind, is the tip of an iceberg in the evolution of this second section. For if restive horse and frozen fountain both contain a bottled-up energy, they are signposts to a different pressure, springing from levels of time less calculable than a calendar of seasons from December to June.That is to say the messages of the dead, that heaving on the doors of the here and now by once-familiar presences, who do not accept oblivion but seek to reinvent relationships with the still-developing living. As a Frénaud title asks, as if their pleas kept surfacing to be dealt with anew: Saurons-nous cesser d’enterrer les morts?4. Theirs is equally an ‘espérance obstinée’, channelled through us as inheritors. So, the image of ice on the fountain suggests another slant on seizure versus 4

Haeres, p.202.

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élan: that of our inventive life-force with regard to the muffled call of the dead. The poet is, more than most, the frozen fountain: emotional surge in waiting, potential penetrator of the crust of time, go-between of mute surfaces and communications of the underside, the dormant and the reawakened. As if answerable to the silent strata, the writing ‘je’ is called to break the ‘ice’ of a cryptic vie antérieure, stirred by an intentionality which seems to insist that one does not live in and for oneself but only as giver and gift. Those ‘morts amis’ not only exert a formless pressure (‘Foule, je me débrouillais dans ma foule en mouvement’5 writes Michaux), levering the tongue with their claim for expression, but form as if a backbone through time, an axis of being (‘se pressaient en moi / debout, et me tenaient droite’) which supports rather than undermines. This second part ends, like the first, with a double imperative (in the first case self-applied, here coming from an obscure community): to retread the corridors of the ‘entre-temps’ (‘afin de leur offrir des années’), and to give one’s voice to a deeper consciousness of time (‘l’exclamer’ links here with ‘offrir…une voix’). The two parts are therefore resonances of that same urge: ‘que ne puis-je mettre ma langue / dans l’entre-temps’. Whereas the first part is composed of loose notations, none more than three lines long, the second contracts as a single paragraph: reflecting perhaps the seizure of a specific memory, or the image of frozen water in a ‘jour de rigueur’. It is already symptomatic of what will be a poem of variable movements and stylistic fluctuations, improvised according to an errant ‘vaporisation et centralisation du moi’. The metaphor of water and fountain reappears at pressurepoints in La vie, lieu dit. Is not the ‘jardin d’innervations’, attracted seawards and to the round heart of the sea, a reflection of the dream implicit in ‘Ton jardin enracine une île en plein midi, en pleine mer’ (VLD, p.87)? Is not the movement from ‘peau’ to ‘puits’, in order to fold a greater ocean within the lesser, matched by : L’eau de son corps rejoint l’eau générale (VLD, p.70)?

And does not the wintry fountain echo the duality of a desire which says at one moment 5

Plume, p.214.

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Imagine un soleil qui prenne vie dans le tressaillement des sources (VLD, p.88),

only to be countered by the recognition: Fontaine on meurt de soif près d’elle (VLD, p.56)?

* Giving voice to the underground is the Ariadne’s thread snaking on into the third part of the labyrinth. And in the process, in this textual ‘entre-langue’, does the self lose something of its autonomy? For the moi which has hitherto been the focus of enquiry is translated into the wider (more capacious?) generality of ‘la femme’ and a thirdpersonal elle. Perhaps one does not savour ‘otherness’ without relinquishing one’s own enclave for a wider receptiveness. The switch of pronouns, the sign of a self losing and finding itself, wavering in and out of identities, is another expression of glissement entre… . The woman pressed against the trunk of a chestnut-tree is a graphic emblem of prospective communication between the human definition and that of the world at large. It is also a variant on the auscultation of channels ‘entre peau et la chair’. Two epiderms are superimposed, each with its own surface and doublure: skin and the entrails, and bark and its circuitry of sap. Where in the previous section the dead pressed her from within, now it is she who presses against their domain in a convergence of ‘undergrounds’, mutually sensitive via this sounding-board of skin and bark in a single laminate. It is only a slight slippage from acceptance of one’s underside as a living ‘jardin’ where one is ‘intime enfin de mon terreau’, to a desire to exceed metaphorical likenesses and join the real. The tree, as medium and agent of metamorphosis between flourishing upwards and delving downwards and in, holds a key place in Bancquart’s imaginative patterning. Most frequently it ‘stands between’. Not just between air and fire on the one hand and earth and water on the other, sealing the pact of fertility, but as channel of exchange between visible and invisible, endroit and envers, surface indigence and nourishments of the deep, the ‘skinny’ transience of the present and a resonant perennity. So it is that a tree’s sudden ‘glance’, lit by an

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accident of light, can peel one away from pallor and platitude and regraft one to real ‘time’, reopening memory and replenishing the living, in times of ‘dying light’, with the compost of the dead: Le regard d’un saule au jaune léger passe à travers le nôtre quand le couchant jette son acidité sur la plage. Nous nous rappelons alors des jardins passés, des pierres qui demeurent de massacres millénaires criant par la bouche des morts (VLD, p.68).

At other instants the tree as tattered travesty of itself, disfigured and abused in a fallen world, haunted by withering madness, can seem to release, as with the ‘marronnier’, a wordless voice from another life to advertise more mobile, multi-directional relationships: Cet arbre à loques, les affiches sur des murs aux branches noires où les dévots ont attaché leurs vœux en lanières multicolores cet arbre à fous, plein de feuilles fanées, parle en toi sans bouche d’éclatantes intercessions avec les merles (VLD, p.13).

As in Habitée par une tendresse its drawing-power, converting into outreach, links with processes of language. Hence the thread leading from ‘que ne puis-je mettre ma langue…’ and from ‘afin de leur offrir des années, une voix’, to ‘la femme sent / des paroles muettes’. (‘Parle en toi sans bouche’ and ‘paroles muettes’ ‘retreat’ in unison into the verse, ‘sing small’ as it were, as if to guard their secrecy and silence.) It is not therefore surprising that the tree’s imaginative flourish should touch, not just aspirations of language, but the dilemmas of the act of writing, embodied in the following lines by the slender ‘trunk’ of a pencil sensing within the call of a vie antérieure invoking tree-top travel and a tracery of aerial figures: Le crayon, tout seul, sent son bois retourner dans le tronc naguère coiffé de feuilles qu’agrandissent les merles, en volant un peu plus large que la cime (VLD, p.52).

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Hints of movement in-and-out and from one side to the other (of tree-bark and written page) are conveyed in the rhythmic alternations at the centre of this third sequence: De ses doigts étalés elle caresse en correspondants souterrains les racines touchant les morts.

One seems to feel an expansion and contraction, a verbal breathing on the move. Does it, in its recurrent pattern, resemble a ‘circulation’? Or a caress played to and fro in the poetic texture? Does it suggest reciprocity: from the throb at her centre to the underground, and from ‘veinules’ of the vegetal world back to hers? Whatever the interpretation, one responds here to a suppleness, to a rhythm of exchange reflective of the confidence of those ‘doigts étalés’, as opposed to the tightness of manœuvre of the earlier picture of the subject as ‘gainée dans la forme des doigts’. Her ‘doigts étalés’ come to mime those of the ‘marronnier’. At the same time a phonetic quiver, a semi-mute but sensually enticing language, poetically animates the transaction: the ‘caressing’ alliterations of hard c and soft s in ‘la femme sent… circulent dans ses entrailles’, ‘elle caresse en correspondants souterr-ains les racines’, and ‘la semence…des ancêtres humecte ses paumes, escalade heureuse…’, enhanced further by the rhyme (even closer to unity) of ‘la semence à la menthe’ and its reverberations (‘humecte ses paumes’). Sounds, too, are ‘étalés’, favouring circulation. As ‘correspondants souterrains’, they, too, release a sub-text permeating other levels with a secret ‘oneness’, an aural pact with the more connotative language coating the surface. Overtures of the dead: are they a function of poetry with its forays beyond the skin of things? Death  the sealed-up, the halfforgotten  murmuring rebirth and infiltrating the fissures of a joint language, brings a creative shock to Bancquart’s work. ‘Les vieux morts tirent sur la vie’ (VLD, p.35), says Qui témoigne. We are, if we adopt an organic view of time, their product. ‘Organic’, given that nothing takes place, however nebulous or other-worldly, but through the thick of one’s ‘jardin d’innervations’ and its ‘rencontre de veinules’. Hence the decidedly sensual nature of this penetration of the bark towards roots (physical, atavistic, psychological and

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temporal): ‘dans les entrailles…De ses doigts…elle caresse… touchant les morts’. Hence, too, the import of the reference in Si charnus dans l’intraduisible to: cet hors de nous mystérieux, qui attend notre mort après avoir posté vigie dans nos artères (VLD, p.50).

One notices how in the current text the presence of the dead, first emerging as an obligation towards ‘les morts amis’, proliferates in synonyms (all in final positions in the verse as if at the tip of the roots): ‘les morts… les ancêtres… les disparus’. It proceeds from the more recent personalized dead, just beneath the surface of memory, to the host of anonymous dead from the nether reaches. This third part therefore evolves, as did first and second, from predominantly spatial notations to a deepening temporal awareness which somehow consummates the section (however incompletely) and brings it to closure: ‘ma langue dans l’entre-temps’, ‘afin de leur donner des années’, ‘la semence à la menthe des ancêtres’. To speak of sensuality, of relationships fleshed through the filter of the senses, does not go far enough. One might even sketch stages of a sexual process, intensified from ‘je glisse, gainée…’ to ‘que ne puis-je mettre ma langue…’ and ‘De ses doigts étalés elle caresse…’, before reaching the moist ejaculation of ‘la semence… humecte ses paumes’, which is not only the textual climax to the ‘movement’, but a spilling of seed between partners who have both given of themselves (as denoted by the participle ‘étalés’). The first three parts of the poem all veer towards a dream of water released, a humid quenching at the end of exploratory approach. ‘Comme on puise dans l’Océan’ communicates, as a final surge of energy, with the image of desire beneath the frigidity of ‘les glaces de sa fontaine’, which in turn finds outlet, through a gentler exchange of loving gestures, in the verb ‘humecte’, bringing its freshening conclusion after an enjambement. In the same drift, time is also ‘étalé’: with that first call for an ‘entre-temps’ leading to a thirst for a durée greater than one’s mortal span, and then to euphoric movement on the ladder of time in the form of that ‘escalade heureuse des disparus’, a climax of transfer in the verticality of time. *

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The poem, as it must, reverts to the skin which, from a first foray ‘entre peau et la chair’ and displacement by a subject ‘gainée dans la forme des doigts’, it has never left. The phrase ‘À l’intérieur de sa robe / la peau…’ renews the motif, there in the first couplet, of ‘l’endimanchée de son désir’. The looping positioning of ‘peau’, at beginning and end of the early lines, draws a notional circle round earth and time, as if mastery of them can be exercized only in the confines of one’s sensual ‘intérieur’. So, one returns, as with the woman hugging the casing of a tree, to a communication released between two ‘skins’: ours with its heaving sub-universe and ‘la pellicule de la terre’ with its volcanic magma and underlying turbulence. The skin, in the dramas of outer-inner, is the sentient frontier: less a surface than a shuttle-service. It is the mediumnic membrane, not just of self and space, but of the to-and-fro of times. It tests opposites through its hypersensitive paroi. One could speak of epidermic memory (as one might of ‘muscle memory’), absorbing the formative present while harking back to a berceau beyond time. If the vocabulary of journeying made inroads at an early stage (‘je prends chemin’, ‘je m’y fraie un retour’), it is revived here by the brusque ‘va’ (an atom bursting amidst cushions of greater verbal fat), by the repetitive drumming of ‘remonte au…’, ‘remonte aux…’, and by the apparition, beyond a colon, of the adverb ‘déjà’ with no verb: an arrival (a sudden reconnection with a first identity) by which the subject is taken back and taken aback, surprised by the speed at which the upstream journey can take place. For the skin is a time-machine. It triggers passages from the contemporary to the primeval, from the civilized self to sub-strata of the species (hence the move from ‘ma langue’ and ‘mon cœur’ to ‘notre peau’). The lurch back in time  from eighteen thousand to thirty thousand years ago, from the caves of hunter-gatherers to the ochre daubs of rupestral art, and from individual identity as a woman to the generic leanings of ‘femme sapiens’  summons from the literary caverns shades of Proust’s Marcel in À la recherche du temps perdu, whose young mind, in the first unsettled throes of sleep, is sucked back through the roots of time beyond specific points de repère to rejoin the most primitive layer of experience: celui-ci lâchait le plan du lieu où je m’étais endormi et, quand je m’éveillais au milieu de la nuit, comme j’ignorais où je me trouvais, je ne savais même pas au premier instant qui j’étais; j’avais seulement dans sa simplicité

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In Bancquart’s poem the return to origins and rediscovery of oneself as lost species, persisting under crusts of habit, conditioned responses and civilised overlays, coincides with a sense of simplification. For, shedding diversity and variation, this central part of the section, the temporal core, takes the form of three matching couplets, unified by the unelaborate chiming and ‘naturalness’ of its rhymes (‘mille… mille…habiles…fragile’) by which sensation washes over sense. (Perhaps the allusion to primitive paintings casts reflections on the poetic art in force here, with its loosening of the corset of form, its improvised collage of uneven parts, its use of language in patches of colour, and its resolute ‘hands-on’ approach, given to immediate sensations.) Indeed the venture of words, sounding time, touches not abysses of abstraction, but a waiting tactile world: one which gives primacy to the image of hands, sensually smeared and thickly coated (‘mains un peu moites, enduites d’ocre’) or manipulating malleable matter (‘mains… habiles à pétrir la pâte’) or stroking the surfaces of flesh (‘caresser un ventre fragile’). Words and hands become as one: exploratory gestures at the birth of the world, plunged in the creative substance, provoking a flutter in the womb of existence. Words are touch, and what they touch is horizons clearing from the folds of time. ‘De temps inverses, va, la peau’. Time is reversible. If, for Proust’s Marcel, one can espouse ‘l’homme des cavernes’ only to be restored in a flash, ‘par-dessus des siècles de civilisation’, to one’s familiar era and context, then so, in this poem, can the speaker find herself with startling brevity travelling the return journey to her own century. Having been ferried in throbs (‘remonte… remonte…’) into pre-history and from 18,000 B.C. to 30,000 B.C. and beyond, a vertiginous jerk brings one back across the gap of time (and through the blanks of textual space as marked by the stranded form of the line 6

À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. 1, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, Gallimard, 1954, pp.5-6.

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‘Tu repars vers ton siècle’). So many eras unfurled are concertinaed back in a single movement and a swift phrase, the decisiveness of which is sealed by the sharp closure from ‘vers ton siècle’ to ‘à présent’. Punctuating La vie, lieu-dit are instants ‘quand fond notre chronologie’ (VLD, p.12). One senses journeys beyond the count of years where the individual, ‘de-temporalized’, catches intuitions of an identity closer to first thresholds: De loin en arrière vient une autre image: un homme effleuré, sans histoire, l’espèce homme, avec son étonnement de naître (VLD, p.12).

It is a poetry devoted to widening the Secrets chemins sous les siècles (VLD, p.85):

‘chemins’ lost and found, breaches in the opaqueness of thickened perception always ready to reseal. So one reads, at a transitional point in Qui témoigne: ‘Me rejoignait bientôt l’à court terme. Quand une fois on l’a débusqué!’ (VLD, p.33)  words pointing to a view of time as inevitable expenditure: time shrunk to our measure and instantly consumed, that recurrent Consommation du temps à notre échelle (VLD, p.34).

Is this why the question looms, casting doubts as to whether one is really in touch or out of touch: ‘Et toi, l’homme remonte-siècles, es-tu exil ou sens?’ (VLD, p.76). Certainly, in this movement of Habitée par une tendresse, the return to the present and resumption of the ‘à court terme’ is a recognition of the limits on awareness: ‘tout ce que tu sais à présent…’. It goes with a more modest acceptance of the human role, which is to be a physical associate of the earth, its empathetic double, modelled according to its terms (‘devenir une égale de terre’). It is therefore appropriate that the end of the section should revert to the role of hands: hands pressed against (‘appuyer tes mains contre…’ as the woman was seen ‘contre le tronc du marronnier’), hands knowing resistance, gaining purchase, applying the pressure of potential unity. And as they do, the tentative ‘cognateness’ produces its own juice: a

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sap (a ‘succulence’, secretions like the ‘semence [qui] humecte les paumes’ in the previous mini-climax) which come, not only to water the world, but to melt language into the alliterations of pure sensation, reducing it, in a disappearing sibilance, to near-silence. * Poetry is an art of two-way communication. It is transitive in more ways than one: transitive in that it seeks to interact, in perception, image and linguistic apprehension, with a fabric of ‘otherness’, loosely called the outside world, which has drafted its ‘proposal’ of partnership; and transitive in that it is an act of language seeking an addressee, a hypothetical second person, infinitely multiplied, with whom that language might mesh, crossing frontiers of self to establish a second joint life. Just as time, ‘de temps inverses’, points in opposite directions, back to the inaccessibility of origins and fast-forward into the concreteness of present and future encounters, so the poetic act is a shuttle between what is lost and what is refound, between depersonalization and repersonalization. It is a linguistic time-span, projecting its structures behind and ahead, exploring both a withdrawing world and the contours of an approaching reader in its overtures. The beginning of the fifth part (‘Figurez-vous…’) introduces the ‘vous’ form for the only time in the poem. Amidst the variable play of pronouns, switching between ‘je’, ‘tu’, ‘elle’ and ‘nous’, it represents the emergence of a new addressee, just as necessary to the poet’s role and identity. Its entry also marks, as well as a new direction, a gear-change, a different ‘time’ or tempo in the text. The first part culminated in a double urge: ‘que ne puis-je mettre ma langue / dans l’entre-temps, l’exclamer…’, where simply putting one’s tongue in the ‘between-time’ (between 30,000 B.C. and one’s own century, say), in order to taste its ‘succulence’, is not enough. One needs also to voice it, to enlist an audience, to corroborate its evidence in the receptiveness of a listening ear. So, the direct address, fuelled by anaphora (‘Figurez-vous… Figurez-vous…’), propels the verse into a rhythm conveying the will to ‘exclamer’ and ‘offrir…une voix’, to overstep those ‘paroles muettes’ which, however far-reaching, circle in the self. It is a discreet entreaty for a more remote second person to

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imagine, take on board, translate and recreate in his own right the import of another, barely conceivable dimension of communication. The message, repeatedly, is the union and near-identity of two orders: ‘mes os se sont emmêlés aux racines’, ‘la terre substitue à la chair de mon corps une glèbe’, ‘ma tête et la courbure d’horizon se confondent’, ‘mon intimité qui s’imbibe au monde’. What is subject to question, however, is the medium: how to enlist a second person in a degree of understanding which would make of poet and addressee a single experience, overprinted as virtually one mind. For poetry concerns more than one transfusion. It seeks another porosity and penetration, this time human: a sharing without which it is still a solitude. It is as if ‘correspondants souterrains’ such as those joined earlier do not suffice. There are other correspondents, closer to the light of day, to be won into complicity. The image of a containing roundness (traced in ‘pleine de graines’, in the idea of self thrown as a seed or a head shaped to the curve of the horizon) seems to invite them, too, into a circle of reciprocity. The universal seeks a personal communicant, and macrocosmic outreach a less anonymous complement in the intimacies of the transmissive word. The wish to render an experience transparent shows in the simplicity of style at this point. Obscurity and rhetoric give way to the refrain-like patency of ‘Je vous souris…Je souris…’ and to the disarmingly childlike simile ‘comme une potée de primevères’. So, the repeated invitation to a second person to respond towards the speaker (‘Figurez-vous’) is matched by ‘overtures’ of the poet in the other direction (‘Je vous souris’). The sourire, insistently halfopening, is a benevolent self-offering to the human. It is an unfurling of face transmitting a still-withheld interior. It is a visible ‘light’ emanating from ‘os’, ‘corps’ and ‘tête’: a transitive language in its own right. The verb ‘se confondent’ strikes the keynote. It holds two movements in unison: inner world reaching to nature, and self towards other, in a common cause. * The poem engages on new circuits as if on a pulse of blood. ‘Le sang palpite bleu… Le poignet bat’. A heartbeat, draining and replenishing the system, is enough to realign the pen and lend the

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textual body new colouring. Systole and diastole, sac and ressac, suction and refill: one passes, in very few words, from the fullness of ‘pleine de graines’ to ‘creux du bras’, from the bulge to the hollow, from the vistas of ‘la courbure d’horizon’ to the closed-in landscape of ‘brume sur les collines de Florence’. And as if that contraction in space, drawing a veil over one ‘act’ and heralding another, were its twin, there is a drawing-in of time: from thousands of years overarched in a flash to the recall of a specific moment in Florence, from a collective history to the vagaries of one’s private past, from the pool of generic memory to the dots of personal reminiscence. For just as earlier one shifted, in the text’s polarizations, from a vast ‘entretemps’ to the recapture of one instant in space and time (‘l’Observatoire de décembre. Jour de rigueur où je marchais…’), so again, in the alternations of crystallization and diffusion which structure the piece, one moves to ‘un matin de jadis’, reconjured so real that it takes the most immediate of tenses, as palpable as a pulse or enveloping mist: ‘c’est brume / sur les collines de Florence’. The ‘poussière de rencontre’ is as relevant to the form of the poem, with its wind-blown particles and surprise shapes, as it is to the workings of memory, nomadic and strewn, and to human relationships, governed by chancy, precarious affective bonds. If the poem as a whole is entitled Habitée par une tendresse, it is partly because of this section at the centre of the text, which is like a secret room where loves hide. Already one has felt hands reaching for hands. Caresses have played over sensitive textures (‘De ses doigts étalés / elle caresse…’, ‘Déjà des mains de femme sapiens, habiles à […] caresser un ventre…’), drawing out a moisture which dispenses language from the further obligation to speak. Now, the verb ‘aimer’ makes a modest entry (‘C’était le bras aimé […] un matin de jadis’): an image, a sensation and a tie of emotions raised from the past, specks in transit of that ‘poussière de rencontre’ which, though extra-close, is no less distant (‘un matin de jadis… la peau de loin’). What is written here, in sparse, disrupted lines, is a love-story, but half-erased between mist and clearance. Hence the allusion to ‘Béatrice, une trace mystérieuse’, summoning in parallel, through veils of time and layers of the literary palimpsest, Dante’s nowmythical beloved. Such dots in the mist, like messengers of some distant fullness of being, punctuate Bancquart’s journeyings: Vous doublez l’air d’une épaisseur de brume en mouvement

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La Vie, lieu-dit avec des pointes d’être insoupçonnables qui nous pénètrent (VLD, p.37).

The speaker, in semi-solitude, prepares herself like a lover for the missing presence, embellishes herself as object of attraction: a call of colour through fog, scents through space, stirring the insipid, sharpening the senses, violating the neutral. Why should the following couplet, the longest lines in the poem and the ones pushing furthest from the shore (the left-hand margin of the page), be in italics? Is it because, holding the centre with five ‘movements’ preceding it and five following, it is a pivot between befores and afters, occupying a point of language pertaining potentially to a different order with a ‘space’ and resonance of its own? It is in a way the most cohesive couplet, sealed in a distinct vibrancy, but the one most torn. It is at the juncture of opposites: between capture and loss, intensity and fade. In fusing on the one hand images of blood or self bedecked in violent colours, and on the other allusions to ‘brume’, ‘trace mystérieuse’ and ‘écume’ (as white-edged vestige), it foreshadows the paradox of le rouge and le blanc. It sits astride the burning and the dulled, the luminous and the veiled, neither conclusive; between thickness of blood and nebulous breath; between fainter pasts and a ‘live’ present (with something due for oblivion coming back to life, ‘brillante encore… écume mal ressuyée fait lueur’); between a white Florence and a red Florence (‘c’est brume sur les collines de Florence… Florence rouge’): all this a rich correlative of memory, rolled in mists but bursting through with visceral intensity, a living state of dispossession and repossession. There could be no more graphic encapsulation of that intensity, that reincarnation or ‘fire in the blood’, than the last phrase of the section: ‘dans l’herbe des bronches’. It suggests that the ‘penetration’ of the porous being is not a mere act of memory, the remote made real, but a consubstantiality of flesh of self and flesh of nature: a climactic condensation of what was called ‘mon intimité qui s’imbibe au monde’ and which defines one, from the core, as a creature of the world. * On the springboard of red and white, and clearing the hazier contours of a passage of italics, the text leaps to a more acute,

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polarized expression of the same. It is not the only time in the collection that the duality is enacted. In L’Incantation s’avale (VLD, p.71), likened to blood in mist, it is a melding of fire and milk: Bonjour, le feu dans le lait mouche blonde.

Elsewhere the battle for precedence spans several stanzas and several swirling movements of the text. Le soir pourpre parcourt les blancheurs du cerveau,

an encroachment of purple on white and a possible ‘conversion’ by warming, is soon to be checked by the contraction (tensed by the alliterative ‘glisse…glace’) of Parfois glisse l’effigie bien glacée (VLD, p.44).

Here in Habitée par une tendresse, the confrontation of the two elements could hardly be starker. ‘Braise, que ne puis-je?’ and ‘Glace, que ne puis-je…?’ are locked in the same form of address but apart, identical in form but on divergent tracks, with the poet astride the rift. The juxtaposition revives, like a slumbering ember, the interplay of those ‘glaces de la fontaine’ and the passion of the ‘cheval cabré’ craving to be unleashed: an interplay translated also in ‘Florence rouge’ and the idealized retrieval of ‘couleur violente’ from the pallor of fog. The parallel syntax harnessing this frictional energy (‘Braise, que ne puis-je…?’, ‘Glace, que ne puis-je…?’) also harks back to the very first stage of the text in that it reverts (in a play of unfinished reversals) to the same plaintive interrogative form, now doublestressed, as ‘que ne puis-je mettre ma langue…’. It lets in a new tide of doubt and perceived impotence, in what is, throughout, an ebb and flow of connection and disruption, shreds of contact succeeded by swirls of distance. What the questions clutch at is reconciliation in lieu of alternation: burning embers with cool water, the frigidity of ice with the blaze of flowers. A reconciliation also of times, no more at loggerheads or split by discrepancy: dawn as an instant of mediation, with emerging sun and watery veils as one, or opposite seasons

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splashed together as marvellous twins. But if the hypothetical ‘noce proche’ seems to brave the adjective ‘loin’, its promise is sustained for no more than the duration of a question. What then reasserts itself, acquiring a note of fatality and made unarguable by the formality of the phrase ‘tel est notre domaine’ (with its universal ‘notre’ allowing no exceptions), is the realm of the entre-deux: a human condition not bringing opposites to unity, but holding an indeterminate middle ground of rose-pinks and ashen mists, tinged with ‘l’entre-couleur de la rose, la cendre des brumes’. It is significant that the frustration of veiled, middling colours – ‘quel entre-monde vivons-nous?’ asks Énigmatiques (E, p.46) – joins with a renewed sensitivity to the limits of verbalization, oral or written. ‘Que ne puis-je […] disant avec l’eau fraîche,’, ‘J’écris l’odeur humide…’. Expression, it seems, never emulates the ‘voice’ of water woven in fire nor avoids the musty and muted. It registers a world of decline and fall, headed for dust and traces. It writes the yielding and the nebulous, via transformational processes where the generous unveiling of life-forms depends, inextricably, on its deathly shadowing. The poet is a gardener, nurturing fragile things, working in the requisites for fertility, cultivating what might blossom from the dormant, but dealing with the opaque and gestures of what was called elsewhere ‘le braille du vivant’ (E, p.11). Not only does the phrase ‘mes doigts sur leur face’ replay the notes of tout ce que tu sais à présent c’est appuyer tes mains contre le visage,

but it returns (in a way which makes one wonder if this long poem itself, as a series of entre-couleurs and variations of the entre-deux, is forging ahead or forever alternating) to the image of isolated fingers: feelers at the frontier. The emphasis is again on imperfect penetration: ‘mes doigts sur leur face’, ‘chacun de tes doigts / découpé sur l’air’. Each is silhouetted against the air, confined as a graphic outline of its own solitude – ‘Tu es seule / dans chacun de tes doigts’ – just as the subject was seen from the first as ‘gainée dans la forme des doigts’. Though transitive and sentient, they are an emblem of alienation: a visual reminder of refused admission. Despite the endless forays into the murmuring obscurity which hedges our ‘chemin de lampes sourdes’, the hoped-for fusion remains elusive. The imagined two in

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one (dating perhaps to before the separation of birth), is beyond the finger-tips, however airily, however darkly, exercised. It is no wonder that this phase of the text, with its own before and after, is split between ‘que ne puis-je… Je pose mes doigts’ and ‘Tu es seule… ne saura te faire commune’. These pronouns at variance do not meet clearly as faces of the same. The self cannot be made ‘commune’. Indeed the final note, swung by the tilting of ‘Je’ and ‘Tu’, accentuates the two-sided nature of being. It has its endroit and envers, just as one’s physical presence in the world, recorded through ‘la peau’, is worked through by ‘temps inverses’. Even one’s ‘other side’ expresses itself to the last  as the determinism of the future tenses indicates  as paradox and impasse. For, behind all excursions, lies the negative of a negative: an absence within an absence (‘ce défaut dans l’inexistence’). Is this the best one can know of being: not something beyond existence (nor even non-existence which at least confirms by opposites) but the virtual blank of inexistence? Or more precisely still, the ‘lapse’ or deficiency within that blank: at times meagrely revealed as fissure or fault, as imperfection or lack, in the otherwise unified face of inexistence? So one can approximate to a handhold of lack (caught in the demonstrative ‘ce défaut’ which seems to make of it an acquisition as well as an absence), in its own way a reprieve, maybe a promise, though never more than vacuous. It is that breach of vacuity within the vacuous which might be a signal, as one tests out the ‘other side’, that there is something else. This movement of the text brings us to consider a creux more radical than the ‘creux du bras’ and its pulse of departure. * If the phrase ‘J’écris l’odeur humide…’ points to an act of writing grappling with barely palpable things, then the next section follows its tracks. It deepens the furrow of the theme of self and language: ‘Il est des lettres à la signature indécise’. Not only does the mention of a personal epistolary form of writing set up tensions with the idea of a missing person, an undecipherable or lost identity, but one is made conscious of unattributed ciphers, of linguistic flotsam drifting from its one-time centre or point of origin, of relics of language no longer testifying to whom they belong or once belonged.

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This section retrains its lens therefore on time, language and identity. The question of an ‘arrière-temps’ again finds prominence: an ‘arrière-temps’ once infusing the rhythms of breath and blood, but withdrawing way beyond the sparse ‘time-captures’ of the literary act, resistant to the recovery of the ‘commemoration’ of letters, more sprawling than one’s puny store-house of recorded moments. The ‘tiroir’ is a finite image of the small-scale, rectilinear compartments which contain one’s ‘holdings’. (It links with the earliest allusions to a domestic world tidily arranged, to desires closed in a corset of Sunday decorum, and even to the fractious horse frozen in ice.) The contrast here is between the vast overspill of lived time, becoming a limitless pool of desire, and what is preserved in small parcels, catalogued and available for recall. It is a similar discrepancy, and the anguish of freefall in a limbo between times, which structures Baudelaire’s vision in Spleen: J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans. Un gros meuble à tiroirs encombré de bilans, De vers, de billets doux, de procès, de romances, Avec de lourds cheveux roulés dans des quittances, Cache moins de secrets que mon triste cerveau.7

Bancquart’s accent is less on the unmanageable clutter or dead weight of memories than on the paucity and unsubstantiality of what memory can retain. The form ‘Nous nous rappelons seulement…’ reiterates the ‘tout ce que tu sais à présent…’ (a mere crumb from the seething millenia which taunt our temporal persona), and by the same token ‘Tu es seule / dans chacun de tes doigts’: quotations all referring to a thinly provided self stranded at the edge of the oceanic. What one does retrieve, spasmodically, is a palpitation in the depths, a travelling glimmer , a transient ‘out of sorts-ness’. Memory is what is called elsewhere a ‘marge pour choses minces’ (VLD, p.43). It is a small side-space, a less than reliable room for manœuvre, aggravated by signs. Such signs (like the human ‘signature’) are slight, fitful and indefinable. They are rife in the poet’s texts. Not only do they crystallize fractionally as reflections on glass, flashes chased on a semi-transparent screen, as in ‘nous posons les doigts sur les vitres d’un autre monde’ (VLD, p.15). But they come as nomads in the 7

Œuvres complètes, p.69.

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desert, calling with false promises of unity and greater sustenance: ‘Mais tu penses aux éclairs entre la vague et toi. Brusques, passagers comme la manne’ (VLD, p.49). This phase of the text exposes an ‘un-co-ordination’ of times. For there are memories (the salvaged specifics of days), and there is memory (an obscure faculty of agelessness, a near-abstraction). On the one hand, the recapture of individual lived moments (‘l’Observatoire de décembre’, ‘un matin de jadis’, ‘un matin’), so diminished and loose as to be almost illusory. On the other, a primeval memorybank close to the origins of life itself, outreaching private recollection but so generic as to be tantamount to absence. On the one hand, one’s meagre acts of personal repossession; on the other, an unfurnished and impersonal depossession (‘sans personne, sans lieu, sans nous, comme une poussée de l’espèce’). It is as if these two notions of time, each housed under the name of ‘memory’, were at opposite extremes of the spectrum of perception. And if, a moment earlier, the poet could write ‘et l’ombre ne saura te faire commune’, then the idea re-emerges: in this over-stretched apprehension of times, in which memory and memory challenge each other’s validity and do not meet in any fathomable common project: ‘Qu’y avait-il de commun…? (VLD, p.33). The theme of the missing person is crucial to Bancquart’s work. It expresses itself in the problematical space of the text, which is ‘sans lieu’ in that it improvises its destabilizing structures ‘entre centre et absence’, and in its correlative, the issue of dubious literary ownership (‘sans personne […] sans nous’) which cannot be sure of its dominant voice nor how to attribute that voice. So, the opening line ‘Il est des lettres à la signature indécise’ is met, shortly afterwards, by ‘Manque un destinataire’ (VLD, p.56): the poetic act falls in the noman’s land between an unidentified writer, inadequately defined, and a missing addressee, between transmitter and receiver. If an awesome anonymity infiltrates this sequence, it is reflected in the shift of pronouns. Impersonal forms take over. There is no singularizing ‘Je’ or ‘Tu’, but only those signs of absorbed or undifferentiated identity (‘Il est des lettres… qu’on ne retrouve pas… la mémoire nous saisit…’). So, everything goes slipping through a permeable self and a broken mesh of memory – beyond the still vaguely calculable span of eighteen or thirty thousand years – to rejoin time immemorial: where self retains nothing of self but fades into a near-void of the species

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which extends ‘avant ta naissance’ to before one’s differentiation as ‘femme’, and whose inexhaustible genetic processes go on spawning mankind in his repetitive image. * It is part of a covert logic, following the recognition that one is ‘sans lieu’ and the prey of continuous displacement, that the new phase in the poetic movement should clutch at the question, doubled in persistence: ‘Où… où?’. Nor is it surprising that the desire to bring things to a common purpose (‘te faire commune’) and the sense of all that recedes into the distance (‘qu’on ne retrouve pas’) should prompt the need to rejoin, to regather oneself near a familiar centre of being: Où rejoindre cette étoile battante, mon cœur?

(The need acquires more edge in that ‘rejoindre’ is left in the air, as if complete as a value, awaiting further qualification.) No less pointed is the verb ‘y demeurer’. It conveys a yearning, after the homelessness and self-dispersion, to take up residence at one’s own heart, no longer drained into non-identity but clasped in a reassuringly tactile world, to nestle there, in the thick of its throbbing networks. The image of what one might loosely call the ‘guiding star’ has a highly creative poetic history. In Baudelaire’s La Musique it presides over a journey, plunged into waves of kinetic physicality (with swelling ‘poumons’ and beating ‘artères’), which progressively loses sight of that star amidst phases of clarity and confusion, convulsion and calm, exhilarating ‘elsewhereness’ and a dispiriting show-down with one’s own reflection: Vers ma pâle étoile Sous un plafond de brume ou dans un vaste éther, Je mets à la voile; La poitrine en avant et les poumons gonflés…8.

In Frénaud’s Plainte du Roi Mage9, the star appears and disappears throughout a trek (with all its textual to-and-fro, detours, hesitations, 8 9

Ibid., p.65. Les Rois Mages, pp.144-54.

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inner contradictions and self-erasures) which becomes a log-book of the turbulences of an unfulfilled self. Instead of clarity and constancy, there is only a luminous seething, ‘le frai des étoiles’, in a proliferation of noise. In lieu of the promised land, there is a cloudy mixture of outer glimmers and inner secretions, of milk and blood (white and red), ‘le lait des étoiles et le miel de mon sang’. Instead of outreach, there is the realization of the limits of one’s resources of illumination in the form of signal-lamps, ‘mes fanaux sont trop courts’ (re-echoing ‘ces éponges plus petites qu’on croit’). Frénaud’s ‘étoile dans mon sang’ thus comes close to Bancquart’s ‘étoile battante, mon cœur’ snared in ‘le filet des artères’. For if there exists a luminous attraction in the universe, how does one communicate with it except via the murky morass of the visceral self? Similarly, memories and mucous membrane can hardly be teased apart in that amalgam of abstract and concrete, macrocosm and microcosm, conserved past and living present, which is man. As ‘Muqueuses de velours rose passé’ indicates (as did ‘passé dans nos poumons’ previously), one is simultaneously corporality and keepsake. Again one looks back (in a text which looks back to Villon, as it did to Dante and other absent-present ‘ancêtres’) to Baudelaire’s J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans: Je suis un vieux boudoir plein de roses fanées, Où git tout un fouillis de modes surannées, Où les pastels plaintifs et les pâles Boucher, Seuls, respirent l’odeur d’un flacon débouché.10

Again it is partly the dilemma of reconciling breath and death. The ‘Où’ of statement becomes the ‘Où’ of questioning and placelessness. The vaguely adhesive but multifarious clutter of mementos  bits and pieces cut from a ribbon of passages, quick visits, destinations glimpsed, pleasures and relationships plucked on the move, shortlived instants of aesthetic uplift, and written expressions of intent hoping to shape a posthumous heritage  where can they go, where find a niche which might save them from mortality yet keep them vitally infused in our onward-rolling condition humaine? So, one returns to ‘dans le tiroir’: ‘Où les claquemurer dans notre destin qui respire?’. Is there no compartment, no storage-space 10

Œuvres complètes, p.69.

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compatible with life’s continuous breathing, which would not become their immediate death-trap, shutting one’s precarious treasures out of life and circulation? * In a poem of openings and closures (including those of form which seals and regrows inconclusively as the word slips into silence only to re-engage), the penultimate movement passes from the connotations of ‘claquemurer’ to a more global recognition of closure: ‘Je ne vois pas une ouverture dans le ciel’. It is a declaration at the same time physical (linking with the tight winter frosts and mists wrapping the hills of Florence), psychological (linking with the ‘reflet de vitre refermée’ which is the glint of memory flickering on an impenetrable screen), and metaphysical (pursuing the thought that there is no ‘étoile battante’ except in the cavern of the self). More significantly, it links with the realization that what one can know of ‘being’ is only its reverse side, almost a mocking correspondence, an absence in its image: ‘ce défaut dans l’inexistence’. So the line continues, over a gap, as if mirroring a breach between the original and its deficient approximation, or noting an afterthought or faltering post scriptum: Je ne vois pas une ouverture dans le ciel autrement que par vide en moi qui appelle.

The one, however, invokes the other. That void in the self and its pull of emptiness may not be a spectre but a ‘translation’, however remote and ‘inverse’, of an opening or roundness in another plane which could be fullness. The ‘appel’, then, beyond mere ‘cris de coqs en fièvre’, is a lasso thrown out into the universe (needing only a letter to transform ‘inverse’ with its privative prefix into the implied wholeness of ‘universe’). The ‘vide’ is not resourceless. It invokes. It calls a content to itself, seeks to furnish its ache. It is an active gatherer, turning tentatively from vacuum into container, from the limitless into filled space: from vide to boule. The motif of the fruit and the circle is a will o’the wisp in La vie, lieu dit. The poet reaches for ‘un fruit juste

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adapté au cercle de nos bouches’ (VLD, p.58) and, in the same text, tastes a rounded moment when the juice-bearing circle of nature fits perfectly inside the human cavity, as a prelude to movements in the ‘ciel’: Nous sentons des cercles d’aubier, dans notre poitrine, réclamer des oiseaux (VLD, p.60).

So, from the separated fragments alluding to closed sky and the inner void, the four-line stanza which grows from them, enjoying greater cohesion and contour, returns not only to images of a well-filled roundness (‘l’orbe d’un œuf’, ‘fermé autour du monde savoureux’), but to those nourritures terrestres (‘œuf’, ‘baies’) which are perhaps our only available ones, towards ‘possessions’ of the earth and the ballast of a ‘monde savoureux’: back, therefore, to the pole which directed such phrases as ‘mon intimité qui s’imbibe au monde’, ‘devenir une égale de la terre’ and the self-definition ‘Jardinière…’. At the same time the stanza reverts to the question of artistic utterance, to shaping and voicing. ‘Mais je trace… je proclame…’. Here, too, threads are teased from earlier phases and twined in a new fabric: ‘que ne puis-je l’exclamer’ or ‘J’écris l’odeur humide’, both of which aim to reconcile the verbal with the vernal (its ‘succulence’). It is as if this modest four-line movement proposed, not only the perfect outline of ‘un œuf’, but a double circle with a common purpose: the roundness of eggs and berries clasped harmoniously in the encircling act of writing and speaking. (‘Je trace…’ no longer has the accidental quality of a vague ‘trace mystérieuse’ which was more a symptom of ‘disownership’, but is here a directed act, ‘vide’ as an applied science, so to speak, and to that extent owned and retrieved.) The speech-act in which the section culminates  ‘dont je proclame baies, bouvreuils, baisers’  creates its own fullness. The lush alliteration is not a gratuitous indulgence. Nor is it simply a resonant rush of sensuality translating the textured richness of a ‘monde savoureux’. In its spread of common sound, it is also an embrace in motion: the reflection, though small, of a unity hugging the shorelines of identity. It is an expression of language edging past itself to become near-metamorphosis, an embryonic metalanguage emerging from an incantation of the world: mere ‘proclamation’ turning before one’s eyes, and in the ears, into poetry.

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* If a conclusion is meant to be a gathering together in an aesthetically secure and unifying whole of the lines of force which have energized, spasmodically and hesitantly, the evolution of a text, then this final part of Habitée par une tendresse is in a sense a false conclusion. Strands of earlier motifs return to interweave in a new configuration, dense and plurivalent, but a configuration which is both a binding and a stretching of seams, a knot and flailing ends, a convergence and a dispersion. Indeed, the first such motif, echoing ‘bien fermé / autour du monde savoureux’ in the previous stanza, hinges on the word ‘autour’: ‘La chaleur autour de la main’. It is the one-word linch-pin of the theme of centralization and decentralization: of what goes to the core and what freezes at the periphery. (A conclusion itself is hub and verbal periphery.) The word ‘autour’ thus undergoes a tilt of perspective. In the first case the poet’s own hand, as it traces a circle, is seen ‘bien fermé autour du monde savoureux’, inclusive of the world. In the second, in the switch of a page, the sun’s heat congeals round the rim of the hand to leave it excluded in an ambivalent ‘gelée solaire’: that hand which has persistently stood out (‘découpé[e] sur l’air’) as attempted intercession and lightning-conductor of transitional energies, as it does in the sculptures of Rodin. The imagery of fire and ice also regains strength. Earlier references to ‘glaces de la fontaine’, ‘Je glace mon corps de parfum’, ‘Glace, que ne puis-je / te joncher d’ardents géraniums?’, as opposed to ‘Florence rouge’, ‘Braise… and the ‘étoile battante’ as a burning hearth, are drawn to that antithetical ‘gelée solaire’: a ‘reconciliation’ still victim of the tensions of the ‘entre-couleur’. The ‘fontaine’ spurts again: no longer seen as frozen (but still a carrefour of opposites). It promotes a slightly different image: that of columns (including the columns of a page) rising and falling. So, into the finale of this poetic project forming and un-forming, crystallizing and dissolving, it brings the terms of a further debate: that of decline and fall, of civilizations, empires and cultures fashioned only to be reduced to nothing. More suggestively, it stands, at the nub of its own upthrust and collapse, as a totem of structure versus ‘destructure’, what is fait only to be défait, ownership versus disownership, and the

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frittering away of vainglorious ambition towards its vanishing-point. It is therefore also a symbol of the act, and this particular act, of poetry. The undoing of structures and their drift away as mere scents of history leads to the more general recognition of life (and certainly of poetry as its far-flung outpost) as a territory of traces. The voyaging instinct of ‘odeurs’ and their knack of hunting out secret passages are a motive force in the poetry of Baudelaire. They are a language of the ‘in-between’: between matter and the volatilization of matter, between the palpable and the impalpable, between things experienced and the fainter transits of a memory of that experience, between sensuality spent and the ghost of sensuality retrieved. Their essence is mirrored in the title Si charnus dans l’intraduisible, a text whose speaker falls prey to ‘ton odeur entre mes os’ (VLD, p.46) as it roams the interstices, and describes what might resemble the role of the poet as the momentary bearer of floating fragrances between possession and loss: Il étreint le tilleul il devient porte-odeur il tourne avec les heures (VLD, p.47).

An ‘odeur’ is the sign of disappearance which is not quite disappearance, of the void which continues to linger as if nostalgically on its own edge. It may be ‘à peine avivée’ but ‘avivée’ nonetheless, as the surviving remnant of a stimulus on the nostrils. It is absence, but still in the elusive form of ‘traces’, like the barely visible fingerprint of a dead friend left behind on the page of a book (E, p.25). And if the scent of lost empires is like the ‘traces d’une absence’, that absence is described as ‘à la bouche’: mouthed, however vacuously or partially, and contained, even as a missing content. The ‘odeur’ represents the paradoxical word / non-word: the marginal flush of a nebulously formulated ‘lost-to-formulation’. Absence in the mouth is never far from Bancquart’s implicit definition of poetry. The void sidles into its slippery practices: … un serpent dans notre larynx creuse un vide (VLD, p.36).

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Expression hires silence as a contradictory companion. A voice from among the half-swallowed musical overtures of L’incantation s’avale says, Taciturne? Tu frappes le silence d’un plectre obstiné (VLD, p.71),

even if that silence, standing in isolation (as on the page) as somehow inviolable, can on occasions be edged with warmth and colour, graced with a poetic fringe: Silence bordé de flamme (VLD, p.43).

The fringe may amount to little more than a linguistic brushing of the ineffable (‘Titiller l’indicible avec des mots’ (VLD, p.62)), a minimal stimulation and arousal which one would like to imagine is more than mere self-arousal. But, be that as it may, and even if, like the ‘absence à la bouche à peine avivée’, it is only a nesh and vulnerable vitality, there can be no denying the glow of illumination which is the temporary and peripheral flush of poetry: autour de la robe des mots cette couleur, la vie chétive (VLD, p.46).

It is a marginality of colour, raised against the abolition of all colour, which goes hand in hand with the question of the marginality of identity: ‘Qui, avec ta plume qui écrit blanc?’ (VLD, p.79). It could hardly be more appropriate that the text, at the end of its weaving backwards and forwards and now on the verge of its own extinction, should clutch back explicitly at the theme of memory. Memory is the relic of warmth around the cooling core, the posthumous scent rising from demolished empires, the vaguely glowing traces of what has dried up as live expression. It is itself, in counteracting obliteration, a kind of ‘défaut dans l’inexistence’. It is, in the congealing, the still-mobile agent of an ambivalent metamorphic space. It continues to shuttle, when the sloughed skin of experience has no more depth, between the surface and the fond. So, as the text expires, to become a spent force and rejoin its own silence, memory comes to prominence: both as a symptom and as potential antidote, on the one hand blanked out from the screen as ‘sable blanc’

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(like the écriture blanche seen earlier always near at hand), but on the other reaching forward as a persevering witness and bearing the twisting presence of the now-extinguished poem into the vacuum of unspecified future readership. If to become ‘sable blanc’ is a form of erasure, then the verb ‘témoigne’, posted on the last promontory, is a tenacious commitment to an after-life and an alternative, if as yet featureless, space of verbal resurrection. The final reversion to the generic ‘Nous…’ as poetic subject also has special significance. In this poem playing to-and-fro between solids (‘prend en gelée… colonnes’) and non-solids, the coagulations of recall and their dissolution, the authorial je is also liable to fade: to know the imminent expiry of its borrowed authority and the cooling of the filaments which have fitfully inflamed the power of words. As the text nears expenditure, one appreciates another ‘empire défait’ with its inconclusive structural efforts, and what is now about to become in its own way ‘traces d’une absence’: the drowning of the colours of the je in the returning neutrality of the collective ‘Nous…’, as the text is handed on to us. * Is the poem a form of writing akin to a ‘stream of consciousness’? With its long-term élan and dogged continuity, marked by interruptions and blanks, drifts and deviations, lapses and reconnections, spurts and resurgences, with its unheralded flash-backs soon to be obscurely swallowed again into the on-flowing movements of time and language, with its underground network of links and subliminal play of association, with its unpremeditated overspill which cannot be contained ‘dans le tiroir’ or classified, one would be inclined to say ‘yes’. Even the final phrase ‘qui témoigne’ is not an end, but reaches forward (as if unaware, within its own textual span, that it is due to serve as a further springboard) to become the title of the next broad division of the collection, Qui témoigne, so that what lingered as an almost detached last note, on the edge of silence, is passed on like the flame of a relay: ember rekindled, periphery made centre, terminus relaunched. In what ways, finally, does the poem fulfil its title Habitée par une tendresse? In the first place, perhaps, by its malleability, its undaunted pliability, its ‘give’, which is the living verbal proof that

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hardness, rigidity, enclosure do not prevail over the expressive fluidities of one’s own ‘unresolve’. It does so secondly by the liquid juice which, however slightly and intermittently, comes from the very exercise of words and their gestures towards enrichment (one might say their affection) to ease and irrigate the spasms and ‘pains’ of the text: the ‘semence […] qui humecte ses paumes’, the ‘succulence’ of no name, the plucked berries of a ‘monde savoureux’. Thirdly, there is the tenderness of a caress: the soft brushing of language on language, and language upon the receptive reader, drawing him gradually to yield to its suggestiveness. De ses doigts étalés elle caresse… … caresser un ventre fragile.

The caress is a sensual communication of ‘the between’. Like the ‘sourire’ (‘je souris comme une potée de primevères’ peeping between seasons), it negotiates between le blanc and le rouge, inertia and violence. Its slight touches excite a transfer between the surface and the depths, just as memory plays delicately between absence and a still-unquiet sensuality in order to re-open the receptiveness of time. It is between possession and non-possession. It is the mist over the face of Florence, somewhere between the muted and a relivable intensity. It is a perfume between what is lost and what still roams over the flesh as promise. The finale of Marguerite Duras’s L’Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas, set as the light, half-discoloured, half-dazzling, fades on an encounter, focuses on the expressive movements of a hand as a fully adequate, revealing proxy of the dubious, suspended relationship between two people: Elle parla cependant, sa main sur la sienne, la secouant ou la caressant tour à tour…11.

Such is the form of Marie-Claire Bancquart’s poem: alternately gripping and releasing, sharply contracting and relenting, imploring and coaxing, aggravating and gently soothing. In its motions to and fro, it is a speaking hand poignantly laid upon ours. 11

L’Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas, Gallimard, 1962, p.128.

LA PAIX SAIGNÉE

(1999)

À la morte Avoir mal est encore preuve de soi-même pense l’opérée à travers sa fièvre. J’ai des envies. On casserait la vitre. Le vent ouvrirait sur ma figure une route fraîche. Je sentirais mieux le soleil, son sang de renfort. J’irais vers l’enfance que je n’ai jamais eue, et qui m’attend. Elle ferme les yeux. Elle y est. Elle joue à cachecache. Elle a disparu de sa vie tombante. Une mer de fougères la recouvre. Elle est un grand calcaire blanc.

*

Marquée d’un pouce terrible la peau de la mourante. Elle attend que nous posions

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tout contre selon les sens qui lui restent des puretés familières feuille de menthe pomme quelques notes de Schubert dernière, seule passe pour la main déjà froide dans la main qui la tire vers les choses inconnues.

*

Notre amie morte elle aurait quelquefois voulu être un arbre elle aussi ou éclatante fleur du melon. Peut-être que nous arrêtons en gravant son éloge un monde qui sans nous pourrait parler à travers elle: grandes inscriptions sur l’espace mythologies perdues et ces dieux infimes qui circulent, l’été dans l’herbe.

The threshold of the poem is the threshold of pain. ‘Avoir mal’ is a shared process. The pierced skin of the unnamed ‘opérée’ is the pierced skin of the poem: the hurt, the awakened nerves, the pulsations, the fight to reassemble the ravaged and the disassembled, are those of the abrupt entry into the cellular basement of words. ‘La blessure veille toujours’ (PS, p.49), one reads. Poetry, leaving the comfort zone, agrees to auscult its own wound, the force keeping it awake. Its gods are not those in the distance proposing a soothing, rounded universe, but gods closer to home, haunting the inner alcove, themselves troubled, torn and tormented by their role in the polar stresses of the human predicament: ‘pas de dieu / sinon ces lares suppliciés’ (PS, p.49). Hence the many texts, groping accomplices of such gods, which show themselves characteristically as ‘torn’: Notre vie, notre louve on l’imite, on est mâchoires, griffes, on déchire à son image, avant d’aller au trou (PS, p.51).

It is at night, when day-time distractions recede and there is little to deflect one from the scalpel of self-surgery, that such texts, in their stretched alternatives of advance and retreat, insertion and withdrawal, register stabs of pain and pangs of tenderness as they move inwards and outwards, between self and other, between wounds inflicted and wounds assuaged: Nuit, c’est fugues, poursuites avec le couteau d’effroi dans le cœur ou tendresses, pénétrantes aussi quand la peau attire avec douceur, comme un intérieur de poumon (PS, p.81).

Perhaps, indeed, these are symptoms of what one might call poetically (diverting the phrase from its medieval context as consuming fever and a different sort of inner burning) ‘le mal des Ardents’ (PS, p.25). The commencement of À la morte is a penetration of pain and tenderness. It is the undiluted recording of a wound (in its infinitive and capital form, ‘Avoir mal…’, unsealed, unmitigated,), and an act of intercession and would-be communion (as if to transmit the message even posthumously, via the solicitude of poetry, that there is more

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than just pain which is the proof of one’s being there or having been there). That poet and bed-ridden patient, both preoccupied by imminent mortality, are inscribed in the image of each other, emerges in another poem of frustrated desires where the word ‘opérée’ runs in parallel: Si nous pouvions dépeler la terre bande par bande, comme on enlève son pansement à une opérée (PS, p.107).

Here a simile, worn as a ‘dressing’ by the poetic ‘soi-même’, feels across the pages towards the ‘opérée’ of À la morte in her crisis of selfhood. Is poetry an intervention in order to apply new dressings: incorporating the hurt and the soothing, the déchirement and the relief of recovery (re-covering)? Does it rip the skin and the superficies, in order to form a flesh less exposed, less vulnerable and ultimately less ragged? Such would seem to be the theme of the following extract, marked by its vertiginous play of doubles, caught between bleeding flesh and resealed flesh: Veines et veinules épanchent notre sang. Notre double s’en va, pourpre sur le fil à linge à la recherche d’une peau moins percée (PS, p.21).

Who, in the mirroring of À la morte, is the wandering double: the poet or the ‘opérée’? Symptoms of a critical questioning of identity are widespread in Bancquart’s world. The existence of doubles, alien and familiar, setting off as proxies into zones normally off limits, is a manifestation of that precariousness. It may be the strange collaboration of a ‘lefthand’ and a ‘right-hand’ self, complementary but at odds, each with its preferential space, sphere of application and rhythm of operation, as seen in the lines: Gauchère, je saisis livres et nourritures en face de cette autre qui mange et tient de la main droite dans le miroir, avec un visage décalé (PS, p.59).

At other times, the enlarging ‘otherness’ creates an image far less sharp, barely delineated: a nebulous companion on the same tight-rope

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of identity, threaded through the dreams which flit between the creature of flesh and a loosely adumbrated being beyond the flesh, undertaking shaky negotiations and giving transcendental hypotheses marginally more probability. Ombre tu es un nom à la merci des heures tu as un autre nom […] tu seras encore nous, soulagé de la chair […] tu donneras corps à notre appartenance (PS, p.73),

says the piece following À la morte. As the last word indicates, identity is a question of belonging: to what? drawn to what magnet of self, to what circumscribable territory of fulfilment? And the agent of unity, with its otherness of name, is no less the agent of division. It is indeed lack of allegiance to what one tends to call one’s ‘self’, that automaton of everyday equilibrium and social adjustment, which nudges one so readily to ‘desert’ and spread wings in a different space. Hence the thought: Notre inhabitation de nous, tu nous attires dans cet espace dénoué (PS, p.70),

where the indecisive cluster of the pronouns ‘nous, tu nous’ suggests a fluttering between persons, an interaction of possible transfers. The photograph which fits uneasily in its frame – ‘Le cadre garde mal une photographie de parent défunt’ (PS, p.49) – is a tangential reflection of that ‘inhabitation de nous’: that non-containment of self or inner homelessness which sends one hunting wider definitions of the ‘who’. In the more harrowing deathbed context of À la morte, the threatened status of selfhood takes on a new slant. Here, faced with invasive surgery, with the negation of the privacy and uniqueness of one individual’s domain, the self has difficulty fending off a sense of annulment and maintaining itself as a defensive position. The thinly held adverb of ‘Avoir mal est encore preuve de soi-même’ indicates the slender lifeline on which selfhood hangs, when other strategies of self-assertion fail. For the painful irony is that pain itself is the last raft

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on which to collect one’s flailing and diminished resources: an acute point of focus to pit against the vacuous and dispersed, a proof, albeit hostile, that the self is not irrelevant or a disenfranchised non-entity. The phrase ‘à travers’ is symptomatic. Thought is a skin. One thinks through it like a gauze, just as the protagonist thinks through her fever, a haze of distorted perspective and wobbling outlines clouding any more reliable apprehension of reality. So, that ‘proof of self’, asserted with maxim-like authority in the first line, begins to lose certainty as ‘preuve’ turns to ‘pense’, something more notional if not illusory, and as it slips through the thin membrane in the text which is the enjambement. Is this why, even though the minimal recognition of a ‘soimême’, clutched in extremis, serves to free a ‘Je’ with claims of its own in the next six lines, the tenses are Conditionals: the tense of ‘would-bes’, approached through a veil of hypothetical, even feverish (because irrational) time? Nevertheless the change of pronoun, the irruption of the ‘Je…’ to take precedence (for the only time in the poem) at the head of clauses as their directional subject, is like a thrust of acquisitive identity, anxious to pursue its last dreams. ‘J’ai des envies’: in the first instance it is an unspecified wish-list, more the cry of a deprived, now marginalized being than a precise set of objectives. It is more a primitive ‘outburst’, an existential protest and catalytic explosion, than a statement. One reads, starkly exposed: Mais au moins cela crier le cri (PS, p.51),

a notelet flanked by the knowledge that ‘on déchire / à son image, avant d’aller au trou’. One of Michaux’s poems is entitled Je suis né troué1. In A la morte, the word imitates life in that the cry ‘J’ai des envies’ is a self-projection meant to plug the native hole (Comme pierre dans le puits is also a Michaux title2), while at the same time scouring and enlarging that hole, left all the more gaping. And one realises that the opening line ‘Avoir mal est encore preuve de soimême’ refers less to any physical wound inflicted on the ‘opérée’ than to the perennial wound of unfulfilment which bursts apart as one seeks 1 2

In Ecuador, Gallimard, 1929, p.98. In Plume, p.99.

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to suture it, the sole burning evidence of one’s ‘being there’. Self (like poetry) is affirmed by being eaten hollow by ‘le mal des Ardents’. It knows itself by the effects of a ravaging void. (‘Et c’est ma vie, ma vie par le vide’, says the poet of Je suis né troué, ‘S’il disparaît, ce vide, je me cherche, je m’affole et c’est encore pis’.) The title of the collection La paix saignée (as distinct from signée) announces texts which tear open states of acquiescence, acceptance and tranquillity. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’3, wrote Dylan Thomas. The unassuaged cry, the unanswered demands of excessive ‘envies’, are a rallying to that resolve (even if the rally appears scattered and vocally threatened): cri vers ce qui n’a plus de cri […] Misère du cri. Cri dans le soir jamais assez dense (PS, p.18).

Bancquart adds: Mordre est une preuve contre la mort (PS, p.72).

It is not a question of biting the world in frustration or revenge, but of feeling the teeth well planted in the self, in the tatters of severed parts and the circles of pain, as a proof of ‘purchase’, as confirmation of an ache which refuses pale obliteration. The claim of the ‘Je’, then, is a statement of unsatisfied space. Its emergence on stage as acquisitive entity translates the potential bursting of prisons and a shaking-off of anonymity. That gathering of energies around the single point of the ‘Je…’ is, indeed, a ‘preuve de soi-même’: a point d’appui to lever one from the indeterminacy of unemphatic or generalized selfhood, and to turn passive (‘l’opérée’) into active, speaking wishfully in its own right (‘J’ai des envies… Je sentirais… J’irais…’). The outburst of subjectivity is an outburst of desire multiplied. The conditionals, in self-rejuvenating waves, give breathing-space and a freedom of alternatives. (‘Ouvrirait’ is the threshold of an enjambement, the textual figure of its own connotation, a ‘passover’) 3

In The Poems, Dent, 1971, p.207.

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The imagery of windows opened, and a wind of space forcing an entry to routes of discovery, provide crucial threads in Bancquart’s broader poetic tapestry. It is perhaps Tu viens du vent (PS, pp.95-105) which best elaborates the intertwine. The sequence begins with a prospect of relief from the rectangular strictures of walls and hard floors (or a procrustean bed of hospital confinement), and from the creeping deterioration that goes with stasis: Tu viens du vent, tu entres parmi les murs verdis des cours.

The new arrival is the messenger of an enigma light as air, with which words and concepts (in their own way walls accumulating mustiness) cannot cope: Illisible, ce rien? Mais l’invite du vent aux pavés?

The metaphor of the window-pane as barrier and demarcation-line, as a guard standing between discordant interests and divided zones, again joins the equation, a barrier attacked, however, by a sudden imperative (with a reactive force similar to ‘J’ai des envies’) which alleviates the text, aerating its mounting tensions with a near-wordless brevity: La vitre entre nous traçait démarcation de guerre, ce fil noir qui sépara notre pays, betterave contre châtaigne, bière contre raisin, malheur contre malheur. Brise vitre.

The phrase in question makes space around it as it forms. If the sublime is to be at a threshold (sub + limen) anticipating transition and transformation, then wind and shattered pane combine here to create such a ‘sublimation’: ‘Le vent annonce une sublimation alchimique’. ‘Brise / vitre’ creates an enjambement in the verse, a ‘striding-over’. It is also a distillation of expression, a reduction of language to a quintessential form where it is what it says. A section in Au pays pardedans reads:

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La Paix saignée Une femme se déshabille pour sentir le vent ancien passer dans le verger nue, elle joue avec le nu du lait puis elle entre où rien n’est à voir (PS, p.110).

Is that monosyllabic enjambement an example of language undressing itself, removing its heavy accoutrements, in order to feel the wind, exploiting the bareness, enter in a gust of primal freshness, closer to the blankness of white and the removal of visual superfluities? Suggestions of new routes and fresh blood are strands of the same fabric. The anti-static question ‘Mais l’invite du vent aux pavés?’, challenging the earth-bound and rectilinear, has the response: Au fond, le couloir mène à la prochaine étape de notre sang,

leading in turn to: oui, la navigation du sang appelle en nous un lent navire.

As in A la morte, there is a reach for new lines of communication. It is as if the lines of the face, from being racked with pain and clenched inwards, were refigured as a call of exploration. At the same time, blood envisages a next stage and a resurgence of its ‘other self’ – ‘son sang de renfort’ – in its own way a ‘sublimation’, a superior translation. The renewal of resources from elsewhere, though crystallized in ‘renfort’, has not needed that noun to make its influence felt. It is not the word itself which has injected vitality into the reading, but a throb of sensual awakening in the texture of the verse which finally finds its focus in the word ‘renfort’. A vibrant fricative thread passes from part to part of the second paragraph (‘J’ai des envies. / On casserait la vitre. Le vent ouvrirait…’), promoting an over-reach of energy beyond the arbitrary halts of full-stops. And as the syntax expands to convey the assertion of envies over thought, each space-seeking line acquires a sonorous autonomy: from the

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cutting edge of v (‘On casserait la vitre. Le vent ouvrirait…’), to the slightly airier, free-floating emergence of f (‘sur ma figure une route fraîche’), to the sibilant and more dissipated s (‘Je sentirais mieux le soleil, son sang de renfort’). An example, indeed, of a phonetic reanimation of the text as desire infuses it. The title La Paix saignée pin-points the thematic centrality of blood. The ‘opérée’ has presumably lost blood, may have needed transfusions in the physical sense, and now invokes its symbol, the sun’s red orb as life-blood of the universe. Blood does not circulate reliably in this poetry. It is not a stable reservoir. It is the fitful feeder of an in-between life. In Notre vie impaire, man is seen as ‘homme des recommencements, animal intermédiaire au sang tiède’ (PS, p.81). Does the hospital patient see herself as ‘animal intermédiaire’, not just between life and death, but between depleted and invigorated blood, as she yearns at the eleventh hour for a flush of ‘recommencements’? ‘Mon cœur, tu prends et déprends à ton tour / le sang têtu, fragile’ (PS, p.17), one reads in Contrées du Corps natal. Diastole and systole do not necessarily ensure a balanced alternation or rhythmic unity, but a pattern of approach and withdrawal closer to the fate of Sisyphus; while blood itself is an ambivalence, dogged and continuous but easily leaked and interrupted. It is over-intimate but uncomfortably foreign. Hence the coining ‘ton sang d’exil’ (PS, p.92): a blood of estrangement which goes its own way regardless of the entreaties of the mind and body that it irrigates; a blood sealed in its own container as an oddity in the universe which fails to conform to the same order as the juices of nature. It is a source which waxes and wanes, becomes sanguin or anaemic: which is why it can be swiftly self-exhausting as in ‘Le sang / se ronge’ (PS, p.89), and why a poem, to prolong its own vitality, can invoke a ‘sang de renfort’ in the effort to ascertain that, in that hybrid flow, un sang plus rouge coule au milieu du sang (PS, p.103).

It is also why, in the ambiguous image-patterns, the statement C’est neige rougie de beaucoup de sang (PS, p.75)

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can be read equally as violence inflicted on purity, or the chill of anaemia revisited by a flush of warmth. The break-out from confinement, first dreamed-of in spatial terms (‘vitre… vent… route fraîche… soleil’), extends (not unnaturally for one whose span is so short) to reach for horizons of time. If a ‘sang plus rouge coule au milieu du sang’, then perhaps an intensified time runs unabated within obsolescent, mortal time: that, perhaps, of childhood, too fondly immortalized in halos of memory to seem a real possession. How does one integrate, assuage, store in a safer past, the deeply embedded voice of time described as le temps tapi dans les entrailles, et qui viendra aux lèvres un jour indéniable… (PS, p.47)?

Has the ‘opérée’, confronted with that crucial moment which may not even be a day but only an awesome split second, felt rising to her lips the compulsive mouthing of a timeless time, visceral more than cerebral, which is both behind and ahead, beyond tenses, like a deprivation which is promise, and a never-had which always lies in wait: ‘J’irais vers l’enfance / que je n’ai jamais eue, et qui m’attend’? Is she more susceptible, as desire disentangles itself in extremis from the shadow of annulment, to a hypothetical other time, comme des éclairs d’enfance au milieu des exactions et des ossuaires sans parole intelligible, sans autre motif que de vivre parmi le vertige du temps (PS, p.38)?

For she may, in her ‘fièvre’, be prey to ‘le vertige du temps’ and abnormally close in her most private thoughts, thanks to the interventions of surgery, to the horror ‘des exactions et des ossuaires’. Vulnerability of the flesh and claims on the eternal are not antagonists but partners. The tensions of their duet shape the following question in Notre vie impaire (PS, p.85-86), which seeks to coax the polarities of ‘Chère viande…’ and ‘…temps éternel’ towards some imagined unity: Chère viande, là, sous ma peau avec muscles longs et fibrilles ma viande pareille à l’orange au chat

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So that poem ends, not with a dispirited shunning of the pains and paltry performances of the flesh, but with the assumption of its rare negative-positive potentiality (thus bringing new force to that first maxim, ‘Avoir mal est encore preuve de soi-même’): je te garde, ma tiède chair, mon inséparable, ma plaie bien aimante.

That life is not reversible does not rule out an available childhood, not rediscoverable as a past, perhaps, but there as a flux of irrepressible future. It stays alive as the lure of ‘l’homme (ou la femme) des recommencements’. It does not let one harden as any single phase or face of time. So, the dying woman finds mobility between tenses – conditional, perfect, present – but is contained by none, finding impetus in an affirmative present which, as a state of waiting, is also a future fed from a past: ‘J’irais vers l’enfance / que je n’ai jamais eue, et qui m’attend’. A similar combination of temporal fluidities, brings an interrogative mood to Au pays par-dedans: De passé en passé antérieur t’attendrait un dernier miroir, qu’il suffit de franchir pour vivre l’avenir en noces? (PS, p.106).

It is not simply the case therefore in À la morte that ‘des collages d’enfance viennent en désordre sur la toile’ (PS, p.106) – for the dream liberated here is neither fragmentary nor collected in images – but that, for the threatened person, an ‘other’ time opens its horizons to one’s last g(r)asp, a time pressingly close yet remote enough for one to say: ‘C’est dans un autre pli du temps’ (PS, p.98), as if there were overlays still to be unfurled. Is anything to be held for long? Can one only fondle the mute contours of ‘l’énigme qui fuit et frôle (PS, p.70), as nebulous as it is sensual? Does the ‘animal intermédiaire’, in an existence of hide-andseek, live anywhere but in-between? The counterpoint of verbs – ‘Le vent ouvrirait’ and ‘Elle ferme’ – breeds echoes for this first sequence. To open oneself to sunlight and retreat behind the eyelids are almost simultaneous alternatives. The ‘patient’ is resistance-less and assertive. She is possession and dispossession. She is movement

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towards (‘J’irais vers’) and movement away (‘Elle a disparu’). She is presence and absence, arrival (‘Elle y est’) and departure, upthrust and descent (‘sa vie tombante’), reinforcement and decline. The game of ‘cache-cache’, foreshadowed by what wavers ‘à travers sa fièvre’, is played as much by the mobile tenses (blurring like a holograph as they pitch between ‘avoir’ and ‘être’), as by the unsettled pronouns, phasing between ‘Je’, ‘Elle’ and ‘On’, by which a ‘Je’, an identity in its own right, emerges only to slip again into the grammatical distance, fading into a ‘relapse’ and no longer perceptible. So, the jeu de cache-cache concerns not only all that tempts but evades a dying person in these, her dwindling moments, but also the precarious hold that one retains on that person, as she tips between the there and the not-there, both a presence and a non-presence for the word-weaver at her side and already in her wake. One understands why the title of the section incorporating this poem is: Un nom, personne. Even her ‘disappearance’ has its dichotomy. For the phrase ‘Elle a disparu / de sa vie tombante’ suggests a timely disconnection from that falling comet, an ‘elsewhereness’ salvaged, like an out-ofbody experience, from the jaws of decline and the pre-inscribed itinerary. What is there to receive her is not bed-clothes, shroud or tomb-stone, but a more blissful presentiment (at this threshold of transition from one ‘state’of text to another) of absorption into nature: a soft envelopment, then a seeping into a porous purity. It is a reconciliatory ‘reception’ into the lap of the elements. It is a ‘slipping over’ evoked by a fluid enjambement: ‘Une mer de fougères  la recouvre’ – as if one were drifting into benign depths, moulded into fronds, as a wave folds round. This is just a preliminary movement of acceptance, however. For the first liquid softness shades into a vision of more durable ‘becoming’: ‘Elle est un grand calcaire blanc’. Sea merges with stone, water with earth, rippled patterns with a prescience of perennial immobility. The verb ‘être’ implies a fullness of being with no margin of separability or withdrawal, embodiment in the greater-than-self which is not just a covering but a taste of identity. If the passage from ‘mer’ to ‘calcaire’ reflects, in its way, a future turning to stone, then it is a turning to stone with no horror. It is a transmutation which, in its peace, in its two-stage absorption of the anguished being and ‘infinitisation’ of an insignificant foreign body, works an antidote on the brutality of the words ‘Avoir mal’ and

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‘l’opérée’, bringing prospective relief from pain and a staunching of the letting of blood. Is it a drained variant of the urge expressed elsewhere: Tu voudrais être l’oiseau, le roc. Te voici à chercher le sang du monde comme s’il pouvait se mêler à tes veines (PS, p.63)?

And might one hear the voice of Keats in the distance, bringing its desirous echoes to this dream of a painless finale slipping from fever to ferns: Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret… To cease upon the midnight with no pain….4?

* À la morte teases us between life and death just as the subject herself, through a fever-haze of capture and loss, selfhood and obliteration, is teased between life and death. So, what might have seemed, at the end of the first sequence, to represent a definitive absorption into the bloodless, the proof of a life finally ‘blanchi[e] d’usure’ (PS, p.99) and a realization of the moment ‘quand nous serons dévorés par les pierres’ (PS, p.65), is not final. Death is not a single event but a succession of forays over the threshold. It can be a series of ‘fausses morts’ penetrating the fragile weave of life. It may be a play of projections on to a ghostly screen at the edge of our perception. What we have just shared, therefore, is a disappearance which is not a disappearance: a ‘pre-death’ which may be more an idealized rehearsal than the event itself. It previews the instant, replayed a thousand times in the mind, and never more compulsively than when the body is at the limits of resistance, when

4

In ‘Ode to a nightingale’.

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La Paix saignée Ton corps s’évadera léger, vers un horizon nul (PS, p.92).

How often, as a human, is one forced to mimic those cliff-hanging birds, hovering on and over the edge: des oiseaux bordent la falaise et se penchent de l’autre côté de la vie (PS, p.75)?

How many times, somewhere between reality and illusion, and in the counterpoint of yearnings embraced and refused, does one grapple with the same ominous magnetism: Peut-être aussi qu’on veut s’éveiller d’un désir: compter parmi les disparus, pour toujours (PS, p.72)?

The poem, like existence, continues in the uncertainties of time, with its own game of ‘cache-cache’. What one might have thought to be ‘la disparue, pour toujours’ and bones turned to chalk is still ‘la mourante’: a vulnerable creature of flesh and blood. What was erasure is still imprint. What resembled a fatal departure, a dip into the irretrievable, is prolonged agony. ‘Avoir mal’, in the most physical sense, still exercises its hold. And even if that ‘pouce terrible’ is the symbolic one of death, its mark on the skin is almost shockingly fleshly. The mark might be purplish or ghastly white. It testifies, in either case, to a deficiency of the ‘sang de renfort’ which could help to repair damaged tissue and allow invisible mending, as well as to the frailty and short resistance of mortality. It is a trace (from surgery or from a well-wisher’s over-affectionate pressing of the hand) which is, as before, an ambivalent and unwelcome ‘preuve de soi-même’, where the mind would prefer to entertain more uplifting alternatives. It is a trace, starkly emphatic, like many in the sensitive matter of Bancquart’s work, which joins with other things ‘Marquées à notre nom, survivances d’une peau qui fut nôtre’ (SL, p.48). Acutely tactile prints, left by us or made on us, which strangely outlive us (and even criminalize us as others trace them back): Nos empreintes du moins – les mêmes– nous attestent. On appuie le majeur sur un timbre humide. Doucement on estampille le vieux tissu, la lettre, le verso de l’image où la tante morte sourit (SL, p.48).

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The verb ‘attendre’, reappearing in the same tense and conjugation (‘et qui m’attend’, ‘Elle attend’), reminds one that this is a poem of waiting. It takes place in, and is itself, an antichambre of living-cum-dying. It is where one feels the swing of the pendulum. For the verb itself veers, changing directions: from what awaits her to what she awaits. And the attente, with its space of non-fulfilment, is not so much concerned, in this second instance, with reaching out to join universal values (‘vent… soleil… enfance’) as with the desire for a few available remnants of familiar things, savoured close to the flesh (perhaps for the final time as an alternative ‘preuve de soi-même’). The phrase ‘que nous posions’, couched in the subjunctive (just as the previous ‘envies’, in the Conditional, had a margin of hypothesis), suggests not only a solicitude and delicacy of touch hardly daring to aggravate the senses, but a tentative expectation on the part of the ‘mourante’ of what may never quite materialize. The form of the line ‘tout contre’ embodies its own meaning. It is a call to clench tight, to huddle close for human warmth. It conveys the need to deny distance. It is an act, however minimal, of rassemblement: of self with another person (hence ‘nous’ joined with ‘Elle’), and of self with at least a handful of the most cherished, quintessential possessions or memories. If these are called, unusually, ‘des puretés familières’, it is precisely because they cling to a purified realm beyond deteriorating flesh, ailing faculties and decomposition of parts. Though twisted in the fabric of everyday perception, registered by the senses, they are, as it were, its finer flower, transcending those senses and acquiring a perfection all the more rarefied as one’s powers dwindle. They come, indeed, as a curative to the evil humours of illness and scent of mortality: ferrying the cleanliness of a ‘feuille de menthe’, the simplicity of form and self-sufficient fruitfulness of a ‘pomme’, and the airy flight of ‘quelques notes de Schubert’. (Is it accidental that the anticipated ‘manna’ of ‘Elle attend que nous posions’ creates a notional anagram, or transposition, of the word poisons?) Such ‘puretés’ are the distillation which remains, almost beyond reach, when the ever-restless Phœnix has stopped its cycles of rising and reverting to ashes, ‘ayant outrepassé la métamorphose’ (PS, p.107). Perhaps they only emerge with such crystalline sharpness at the limits of disappearance where one is peculiarly alert to a point où restent les distances en signes très purs

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La Paix saignée vers des lieux disparus (PS, p.38).

Perhaps the descent into nothingness goes hand in hand with that formulation, at the eleventh hour, of a perfection with no foreign bodies of which le néant is the only real vocalization: le néant peut-être colle exactement ses lèvres sur la pureté de ce qu’on m’enlève (PS, p.77).

‘Feuille de menthe… pomme…’, with no verbal elaboration or fanfares: it is not surprising that these entice as the most natural things, not torn against themselves, unable to conceive of their presence as contradiction, nostalgia or dilemma. ‘Feuille de menthe’ is green growth and, essentially, a scent. The urge to identify with it as one is ultimately stripped may stem from an intuition akin to that of Baudelaire: ‘Il est de forts parfums pour qui toute matière / Est poreuse’5. Perfumes which disengage from the gulf of ‘miasmes humains’ and the ‘âcre odeur des temps, poudreuse et noire’ which taints it. Such scents haunt the poetry of Bancquart. They hover at the margins, as a jeu de cache-cache. They are nature’s secret ‘voice’. ‘La terre est parfumée’ (PS, p.72), one reads. It is a statement resonating in a myriad of contexts. Of Ulysses’s boundless journeying it is said, ‘Sur la mer aride, il se délectait d’aromates’ (PS, p.74). Elsewhere there wafts a ‘pénétrante odeur de miel sombre / venu d’un étrange pays’ (PS, p.17). Testifying to the sea and so evoking the travels of Ulysses, but referring, too, to the ethereal travels of music (‘quelques notes de Schubert’), there comes this influx of lacy porosity: Une odeur d’iode nous traverse comme une flûte piccolo (PS, p.100).

At another moment, blending in more closely the properties of herbs (like mint-leaf) and their efficacy in the art of managing impending darkness, the poet writes: La nuit, on suspend des herbes magiques dont l’odeur porte doucement de rêve en rêve (PS, p.80).

5

Œuvres complètes, p.45.

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The quotation is especially relevant to a damaged person, progressively obscured, yearning to be borne gently between those two dreams which are life and death. Might one also see the conjuring of a scent, and the breathing of it for ‘redemption’ through the thick of mortality, as the essence of the poetic act? For, just as in this text one passes in few lines from the funereal conclusiveness and downward absorption of ‘Elle est un grand calcaire blanc’ to the wispy disengagement of ‘feuille de menthe’ and ‘quelques notes de Schubert’, so, in a later piece, one feels the tension of ‘craie’ and ‘odeur’ on the page and at the centre of the potentiality of words. Arbres (PS, p.93) reads: et nous, ah, notre craie de pages qui nous entraîne pour jamais vers des contrées sans certitude! – Sinon dans les marges, pénétrant les mots d’une odeur profonde l’humus, ses arbres dans la peau…

As in À la morte, what seems for an instant sealed in a chalky sarcophagus sniffs out its own possible exception, even if that ‘exception’ can only roam the literary margins, as ‘vaporisation’ rather than ‘centralisation’ while still rooted in the senses. If the ‘pomme’ is the epitome of fruitfulness, it is also whole (and wholesome), a model of roundness. It is complete in itself, the product of a collaborative harmony between skin and inner sap. It is both flesh and form. It is also fruition in time. Hence the reference, not to an apple, but to another rounded fruit which seems, as it forms, to correct ‘notre vie impaire’: Sur notre paume une cerise roule née du matin. Sur cerise notre caresse approche une rondeur du temps (PS, p.80).

In À la morte the noun ‘pomme’, free-standing as a miniature world in its own right, is such a ‘rondeur’. It is held in the text by gestures no less physical than ‘paume’ and ‘caresse’. For it, too, is clasped by ‘pouce… peau’ and ‘main… main’: encircled in a poetic sensualism.

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Is the word ‘pomme’ as mouthed and retained in this context, similar to the word ‘phlox’ as captured by the child from her grandfather’s mouth, described thus by the poet: Il m’envoyait ainsi cueillir des phlox pour la table du dimanche. Il disait ‘phlox’, sans se douter que ce nom, éclatant au milieu du parler d’oc, était pour moi précieux, rond, incroyable comme un rubis (PS, p.19)?

Though more ethereal and less containable in the hand as a palpable prize, the ‘quelques notes de Schubert’ are no less a purity to ease the suffering senses: a music of the final frontier, between words and silence, between two notions of time and tempo: et le plus palpable du temps c’est, avant de nous endormir, cette seconde: une fumée, une musique fugitivement reviennent avant de façonner nos rêves, à la frontière (PS, p.64).

It goes hand in hand with that readiness to depart, to disconnect from worldly links and be transmuted into other life-forms. It is a mysterious curative, a messenger of the quintessential: Je me descelle je me dispose en terre, écureuil, bégonia. Contre l’impersonnel, contre l’autodétruit, à la limite de l’audible, une musique esquisse la capitale de tous règnes (PS, p.102).

Is it too far-fetched to suggest that such distant strains, idealized in the mind and having a floating existence between senses and memory, time and timelessness, come to haunt us as tokens of a ‘redemption’ – a transparency and cleanliness – when one is most threatened by the opaque, the depersonalized and a drowning in the uniform? Such appears to be the sense of the first poem of La paix saignée: Un bâton dans les jambes il chevauchait sur place psalmodiant les chansons de geste de son peuple. C’était en Asie, au milieu d’un marché.

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In the flesh of the text Nous pensons à lui quand nasillent les disques des grandes surfaces (PS, p.45).

Together, the ‘feuille de menthe’, the ‘pomme’ and the ‘notes de Schubert’ compose a sensual trinity, almost untouchable but urgently called for, like the need to write the last will and testament of one’s remaining valuables. The phrase ‘Elle attend que nous posions / tout contre / selon les sens qui lui restent…’ accentuates a dying attachment not so much to metaphysical values as to the preciousness, faced with collapsing faculties, of a small collection of sensual delights: scent, taste, touch and hearing. Is the missing one here that of sight? And is ‘la mourante’, in her request to have things within touching distance, irrevocally close to the shadowy realm of les aveugles? Une fraise, un doigt bagué, une tasse elle se les figuraient avec la myopie des mourants qui fixent les choses (PS, p.11),

one reads in Contrées du corps natal. The final quatrain of this central part of the poetic triptych (like a secular pietà) marks it as a study of hands. Just as the section began with hands making contact with another flesh (‘Marquée d’un pouce terrible / la peau…’), so, at the end, the hand of the dying (‘pour la main déjà froide’) and the hand of death (‘dans la main qui la tire’) join in a chassé croisé which is a kind of ‘hand-over’. In Personne, the speaker reassures herself, Tu peux encore tendre la main à l’homme qui ne sait plus à quoi servir (PS, p.76).

Perhaps the appearance of the pronoun ‘nous’ at this juncture of À la morte (where the first movement saw only a relationship between ‘Elle’ and ‘Je’) is the symptom of a ‘reaching out’, of a penultimate initiative of human linkage: as is, on a larger scale, the recuperative act of the poem itself. One cannot escape the sense, none the less, that it is a study of gestures which do not coincide, which pull at cross purposes and stay stranded, unable to meet that imagined human warmth and comfort which ‘posions tout contre’ implies. They are, for all their intensity, ‘des gestes déshérités’ (PS, p.46).

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The final quatrain falls into a poetic order of its own. It forms, as this part draws to an end, an almost perfect hexasyllabic stanza. (Only the last line, ‘vers les choses inconnues’, with its step towards uncertainty, strays marginally, by a single syllable, from that pattern, as if to symbolize by that ‘syllabe séparative’ (PS, p.109) ‘notre vie impaire’.) After the dispersed notations of the preceding lines and of the whole poem until now, the formal quatrain resembles a square – perhaps a tomb-like contour – a last receptacle or enclosing enclave in its own right. It is a place where a hand-over occurs: one hand, physically weak, ceases to function (‘la main déjà froide’), while another, of a different order, exerts its pull (‘la main qui la tire’). The consecutive enjambements hint at that slippage, its ‘over-the-edge’ inevitability: ‘seule passe  pour la main’, ‘qui la tire  vers les choses’. And on entry to that further zone, links of self become dubious. The adjectives ‘dernière, seule…’ are, one assumes, still somehow attached to ‘la mourante’, but they are left, in this ‘passover’, devoid of a subject to exert direction and lacking a verb which might act as the proof of efficacy of action. They are strangely bereft, remnants adrift from a person now virtually obliterated, before the incorporation into the realm of ‘choses inconnues’ (of which self, vanishing from the screen, will become one). Just as there is a ‘blank’ at the end of the first part, so there is an erasure, and a double anonymity, at the end of the second. For the gravitation towards ‘choses inconnues’, in contrast to the personal flavouring of such points of anchorage as ‘feuilles de menthe… pomme… notes de Schubert’, is a movement into the undifferentiated: towards a pays on which the mind can have no purchase, even on what was its own identity. * The three parts of the poem form the most subtle of triptychs. The shift in their three opening couplets, from ‘opérée’ to ‘mourante’ to ‘amie morte’, is a graduation of ‘phases’. It is a text, not written after the event, but going through the living / dying stages of that event. It is a text which, as it reconjures, evolves in time. And if it traces a before, ‘middle’ and after, such simplicity of contour is confused by approaching and receding wafts of deathliness, thickening or thinning consciousness, acuteness and remission, surges

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and relapses, moments of greater or lesser ‘animation’. Death itself is a game of ‘cache-cache’: advancing inexorably but to-ing and fro-ing, sealing its stages one by one but back-tracking, vacillating, undoing or postponing its purposes. The triptych is stitched with such temporal complexities, as also by the dancing pronouns and what they imply in terms of identification and separation of selfhood, distance and closeness, the proffering and withdrawal of human warmth. For, paradoxically, as the poem veers fatally from ‘opérée’ and ‘mourante’ to ‘morte’, the ‘salvation’ of a shared relationship becomes more tightly bonded. The simple touch of ‘Notre amie morte’ turns disappearance and dispossession into affectionate presence. It abolishes the anticipatory gap of ‘Elle attend que nous posions…’ to create an undivided embrace. It is the ‘nous’ which, from being merely invoked, now initiates: which takes over where the other person can no longer do so. The tense-change is telling. It moves from the more assertive value of conditionals in the present (‘J’ai des envies. / On casserait la vitre’) to the still-tempting but now-unattainable conditional-in-thepast (‘elle aurait quelquefois voulu…’). The voice of desire lingers on in some memory, but sinking into irretrievable time. ‘Quelquefois’ dilutes to drifting-point the previous fervent sequence ‘On casserait… ouvrirait… Je sentirais…’. The desires articulated (through another’s mouth) are virtually unchanged, representing persistent continuity through the phases of inevitability. They are posthumous echoes of the same. ‘Être un arbre […] ou l’éclatante fleur du melon’ come, undiminished in spite of mortality, from the same source as ‘feuille de menthe’ and ‘pomme’. They reflect the pipe-dream of turning into a thing of nature as part of its pervasive perennial life-force: an ‘unrealism’ fed during one’s lifetime by vibrant instants of the real. Hence the many references to the sun’s ‘new blood’ and to transfusions other than by plasma-bag: Te voici à chercher le sang du monde comme s’il pouvait se mêler à tes veines (PS, p.63).

It is a vision broaching alternative notions of movement in time and space, less thorny, less fraught with contradiction: Sèves et sang battent ensemble le rappel d’anciennes navigations hauturières

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La Paix saignée dans un espace sans épines, sans divinités (PS, p.109).

One understands the longing, now voiced posthumously, of an over-susceptible body, treated as dehumanised meat, to espouse another form, surer of its ‘circulation’, its rootedness and growth. So, one reads in Un nom, personne: L’intérieur des arbres est mystérieux avec leurs articulations qui secouent les nuages au bout de leurs feuilles. Toi piétiné, toi disparu, leur corps subsisterait ici intact (PS, p.63).

The vulnerable subject of À la morte has been ‘piétinée’ and is a ‘disparue’, but envisages another body, both more durable and more supple, better able to shake off wounds, retentive of a more ethereal space, astride two realms. Perhaps the tree, sucking in and breathing out, groping down and reaching up, bridging cloggy underworld and finesses of the air, symbolizes also a mediation between persons. For a sequence entitled Arbres reads: Une pêche à la main, je rencontre un inconnu, qui tient une pêche à la main. Entre nous se dessine un arbre sur le trottoir peuplé, dont les passants soudain forment verger, avec sous leur peau l’aubier tendre (PS, p.91).

‘Entre nous se dessine un arbre’: is it with the same significance, the same surge of bonding and wishful transfer, that the appropriation of ‘Notre amie morte’ and the ambitious ‘être un arbre’ come to interlock in the present poem? The variant to the ‘out-of-body’ dream, ‘être un arbre […] ou l’éclatante fleur du melon’, seems a more modest afterthought to the first. While expressing the same thirst for vitality in full flourish, it is arguably more proportionate to a brief life glorying in its seasons. The ‘éclatante fleur’ combines the dazzle of a moment and the necessity of fade as partners of a single purpose. It holds, in marvellous contours, the precariousness of life: déjà, nous tenons à peine

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In the flesh of the text sur la fleur et si nous le savions assez nous garderions la trace des minutes, notre trésor (PS, p.83).

The tree stands towards the pole of perennity, the melon flower closer to a fate of vanishing traces, to be savoured all the more urgently. Does it also, by a secret thread, and though the desire for it may be the most private of attachments, bring one closer again to the ‘nous’? Is that one of the implications visible in the filigree of the lines: tu seras encore nous, soulagée de la chair cueillant des fleurs obscures près d’un livre aux caractères blancs tu seras notre ombre sans ombre (PS, p.73)?

For not only is one dealing with a person now ‘relieved of the flesh’ and perhaps nearer in spirit to flower, but the ‘shaking off of mortal coils’ appears to coincide with the breaking of other boundaries: the subjective cocoon, fences of the natural world, demarcations of light and dark and – in ideal moments – divisions between the explosive splendour of the real and the relative pallor of the literary medium. It is no accident that at this point in À la morte, the third and last panel of the triptych, the dying and the fusion come together. Second person becomes first person plural: ‘Notre amie morte’, ‘tu seras nous’, thanks to the emergence, as it were, of the aspiration to flowerhood. It is also in this final panel that those ‘fleurs obscures’ move closer to the presence of ‘un livre / aux caractères blancs’. Indeed this part is modelled as a unity on the juxtaposition, posthumously favoured, of ‘l’éclatante fleur’ and the literary act of commemoration. The text, in its last orientations, hinges on ‘Peut-être’. The dubitative link brings the writer to question the efficacy and value of a different kind of existence: that of the poetic act as it seeks to retrieve, embrace and unify. Its own itinerary is a hazardous passage between life and death: between glimpses and obscurities, paths and exclusion, salvation and empty-handedness. In its networks and liaisons, in its solemn fashioning of form, it, too, has anxieties as to what constitutes circulation of the blood and what is a clotting of dead signs, as to what is a thrust of revival and what is deterioration and loss. This is a poem, therefore, which investigates in tandem two kinds of ‘traces’ or

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vestiges and their likely future: those of ‘la morte’ and those of words (ageing corpuscles of a poet no less a ‘mourante’). The theme of the penultimate stanza is the doubtful intrusion, no more certain than that of surgery which may do more harm than good and does harm in order to do good, of words. The suspicion clouds the text, in an ère du soupçon, that language, instead of aiding the transfer of the lifeblood of the person commemorated, is actually an impediment and stops the flow. Does it turn that person to stone? Such may be the sense of ‘gravant’, as if the poetic act, though opening to clasp a second person, succeeded only in carving a further, verbal tombstone. Do we, as well-meaning but invasive outsiders, superimpose ourselves on what would, without those over-formal incisions (and if one could nurse that silent lull in language which ‘speaks’ more fully), give voice secretively and fluently to itself? Language may be too hard and congealed, or too soft and dispersed. On the one hand, the verbal medium of travel may, like Ulysses’s oar in the ocean of his quest, labour dans une bouillasse de sang coagulé autour des paroles pierreuses (PS, p.76).

Words may act, not as easers of prison-bars, but as their reinforcer. They may become a screen, a vitre, a buffer of resistance: Ta voix est un pare-chocs déformé où les mots se sont tamponnés sans retour (PS, p.47).

They leave one searching (as a literary Ulysses) for that paradoxical break-through which enables one to transcend words by using words, bringing relief (as to the broken body on the bed which is its mirror) to ce mien corps fatigué de chercher le moment femme, le moment casse-mots à force de mots (PS, p.38).

It is in that sense that the speaker can say La nuit, après avoir franchi la grille des mots, tu marches dans un parc heureux (PS, p.109)

– except that, in the finale of À la morte, the ‘tu’ may be rather ‘la morte’, slipping away through the poet’s sieve of words into a natural

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osmosis and greater euphoria of space. At the other extreme, language may resemble division and erasure, particles on the wind with no reliable cohesion. ‘Tes mots concluent sur mal et fêlure’ (PS, p.84), says the voice of Notre vie impaire, while, among pronouns lapping tidally between self-loss and self-recovery, a returning ‘je’ confesses: je proclame avoir manqué et ma parole même ouvre hiatus dans trou aggrave une dépossession (PS, p.77).

So, Ulysses, obliterated into a vaster entity and dispersed as a nonentity in the near-silence of other cosmic voices, comes to regard the verbalization of his own speech, that incongruous human appendage, as tantamount to nothingness, a lightweight irrelevance: Personne, son vrai nom, né du grand creux du ciel et de la mer, augmenté de ce rien: la parole effaçable (PS, p.74).

The question of who or what speaks inhabits this final section. Should it be the words of the poet on behalf of that ‘amie morte’, or the reverberations of a world of which the amie alone is the finest medium and sensitive transmitter, if only one knew how to favour them by removing the hindrance of one’s vocal presence? So, the dilemma, at the point where the ‘nous’ of ‘Notre amie morte’ has come closest to assuming a joint presence, is that it is also the juncture where a suspicion creeps in that it is only ‘sans nous’ that proper expression can be given to that person’s timeless language. It is, therefore, where the literary endeavour (and its engraving of epitaphs), seeking a sublimation of itself which is a form of self-contradiction, confronts its own impotence. ‘On parlerait presque’ (PS, p.46). It is a mission launched only to hold back, which gives voice only to realise the need to withhold. ‘Trouver une langue’, Rimbaud records. In order to track the movement of ‘les mourants’ and relay the modulated tune of the dying… dying… dead, one must find the point, if one’s words are to shadow them with no discrepancy, where les mots qu’ils essaient roulent inaudiblement sous leur langue,

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La Paix saignée jusqu’à leur fusion dans le nul (PS, p.12);

where, beyond the stiffness of ‘engraved’ words, one scents the nearsilence of … cette respiration étrange d’un intérieur rougi qui souffle-avale poumon sous peau de terre et cendre (PS, p.33).

So, the poet of À la morte, faced with finales and the self-consciously finite nature of verbal monuments, reopens the text through doubt to the possibilities of a still-elusive language: traced on space and sucked towards the hinterland of ‘des contrées sans certitude’ (PS, p.93). Where she might say, poised between hers and another speech: Présente – absente je vous célèbre au plus bas d’une voix qui attend d’être prise en murmure, en soupir, en doigts légèrement mobiles d’une feuille en transformation… (PS, p.39).

Just as the second part of the poem ended with the juxtaposition of two poetic forms, as if contesting each other’s claim – the slighter scattered jottings of ‘feuille de menthe… pomme… quelques notes’ set against the more regularly built stanza – so, in the third and culminating part, the effect is repeated with double force. On the one hand there are the haiku-like wisps, riddled with space, of ‘être un arbre… elle aussi… ou l’éclatante fleur du melon’. On the other, there are, not just one, but two formal quatrains, cementing in the words ‘gravant’ and ‘inscriptions’ to close the poem à double tour. They confirm the dialectic, implicit throughout (and seen in the pairing of ‘mer de fougères’ and ‘grand calcaire blanc’), of the flower and the stone. It is a dialectic oscillating finely within La Paix saignée. It may be a more durable print chasing the fugitive: ‘Quelquefois pourtant, un geste de pierre / évoque la courbe d’une jambe’ (PS, p.46). Or a sign of divergence between sprouting nature and man-made commemorative structures planted against the grain: ‘La forêt seule étouffe / cette statue oblique’ (PS, p.59). It may be prompted by the desire, common to poetry, to find a finale which would seal (while refusing to seal) a precious moment in more lasting materials: ‘vous fugitifs, précieux / qu’on aimerait incruster dans le quartz’ (PS, p.82).

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It may suggest, in its tensions of freedom of the air and compactness of minerals, that poems are, indeed, the ‘post-scripts’ of Icarus, as in this illustration: Icare survit à sa chute ici, sous un vitrage en sculpteur de troncs d’arbre. L’énigme qu’il avait lancé dans les nuages s’allonge maintenant dans ses mains (PS, p.96).

The enigma is not simply that of life and death, nor of a person’s transport into another realm, but that of the literary performance as related to life and death: that strange aftermath, far-flung but cooling as vestiges somewhere between here and the beyond. That the text should plunge through space, loss and the infinitesimal towards its last note ‘dans l’herbe’ – place of burial and natural growth – is apt. It gravitates finally to where bodies are inhumed, and any tribute aspiring to the title À la morte must be itself posthumous. It is in that vein, and mirroring her own poetic project, that Bancquart gazes at those statues mystérieuses dans les bois de l’Aveyron, petites idoles des fontaines, à Desvres, fixant, condensant l’humus qui donne et reprend vie (PS, p.39).

Indeed, the title could also mean ‘In the direction of or towards the dead woman who I am in potential and whom I shall become’. As she admits,‘Je sais mon corps en location, promis aux humus’ (PS, p.60). Grass is not ultimately synonymous with suffocation and departure, however. On the contrary, offshoots through the collection point to an expansive beneficence: Si je voyais entière une seule herbe ce serait assez pour la globalité du monde (PS, p.62).

As cosmos and not coffin, as saturation rather than deprivation, its elasticity presses on the layers of an accumulated mystery: Nos pas pressentent un secret, sur le sol élastique où n’en finissent pas de se superposer les jours en fuite

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La Paix saignée d’humus, de minéraux (PS, p.81).

It is the place where, as living dream and hidden rhythm, ‘Sèves et sang battent ensemble’ (PS, P.109). It is where the poet can say as the text expires, having traversed her own life and death through the itinerary of another: – Je ne suis plus qu’herbes dans pré sans mémoire ni science où glisse l’être, heureux à peine d’errer, d’ecrire un rêve (PS, p.111).

It is where writing, the breath of life and the breath of death know the privilege of sharing a common bed, even a language, and merge. * This is not a poem animated by the grand souffle, any more than is the process of dying. It is not reliant on the formalities of traditional architecture nor over-arched by a constructional plan. It is composed of variable notations: words essayed in space and devoured before re-emerging, staccatos of a difficult continuity. (Only the last two stanzas congeal as such, though less as monument than closing wound, thickening and cicatrising as they near their final moment, and even then hedged by self-doubt and resisting their own intentions.) If, then, the voice which speaks through ‘notre amie morte’ emanates from somewhere among the ‘dieux infimes’, then Bancquart brings to meet it a language which is correspondingly minimal, intermittent and unsettled. ‘Des syllabes battent’ (PS, p.46). The same is true of the present text, articulated as it is, not on broad sweeps of syntax, but on tiny throbs of formative significance. It coaxes its subject via what the author calls ‘ces inflexions minimales’ (PS, p.47). It stays discreetly close to silence, to that inner lining of silence which the slightest inept or excessive note might offend or aggravate: that Cher dedans du silence douceur qu’éraflerait toute syllabe séparative! (PS, p.109).

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This is a text which slips between dividing-lines and erects no walls. Which espouses the waverings of ‘la vie souple’ (PS, p.105) – and of its counterpart death – to drift and flutter with uncertainties: ici l’incertain, la voix basse ici les mots en brume (PS, p.79).

In their ‘unfinished’ nature, the words of the poem, in keeping with the torn emotions of the text, could be seen as evolving wounds in their own right: mais tout se dit à force de fragments blessés (PS, p.62).

Perhaps also as representatives of ‘Notre vie impaire’ (PS, p.80), with its things, including time and its ‘inégale minute’, which do not tally or find the perfect coincidence. What, then, is the function of the text? Is it briefly to exploit that hazardous channel of communication, that crevice in self and in the world, which allows one to sound the forbidden territory of another body in its elusive time and space: Moi, si je parle, une fente laissera-t-elle s’épanouir un peu de ce corps défendu, invisible, qui sait se rappeler à travers une odeur les voyages anciens? (PS, p.78).

Is it indeed, as the broken syntax of the first line of that quotation hints, to rediscover, in the act of words, the self as fissure? As such, can it do more as it brushes past disappearances than ‘flatter le rien du rien’ (PS, p.47). Be that as it may, it remains an act of faith in the ability to lean against death and salvage something from it. Though sparse in rhyme, Bancquart’s poetry echoes the ‘naïve hope’ of a rhymer of two centuries ago: Quelquefois la mélancolie de mes esprits va s’emparer c’est alors que je versifie et tâche ainsi de conjurer cette ennemie insupportable (PS, p.35).

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It may not be a durable laying of ghosts. Nor can it be a transcendence. But it is a resilient transgression, the ‘crossing’ of a law: et quelque chose naît, comme une transgression de la mort quand elle colle ses lèvres aux autres, en face, froides (PS, p.98).

What the lips utter is not a kiss of resurrection, but ‘quelque chose contre l’imminence’ (PS, p.8). It resembles the refractory cry of the child, whose simplicity of mind defies the vetoes of social decorum, when he sees death as if for the first time and confronts its trauma uncomprehendingly: et il avait raison, le garçon simple d’esprit qui s’agenouillait avec nous parmi les fidèles, très placide, jusqu’à ce qu’il pousse un grand cri: ‘Je vois tuer, je vois tuer’. Alors on le faisait sortir (PS, p.28).

À la morte is that cry, though in all gentleness. No-one shows it diplomatically to the door, nor does it stay alone. It brings the person, the poet and the infinity of possible readers together in the phrase ‘Notre amie morte’. It becomes the proof, where other certainties fail, that ‘Elle n’aura pas été tout à fait nulle, notre confiance’ (PS, p.112): such confidence being, among other things, faith in words and poetry. The word ‘notre’ is an achievement. It is the migrant messenger of anonymous fusion. ‘La morte’ is unnamed; the poet becomes a verbal no-one as if sacrificed to that namelessness; while the reader invited to stretch into that ‘nous’ is anyone or everyone. Names as demarcation dissolve in the shadowy transfers of mobile time (as do the shifting tenses of the poem, which allow no territorial rest): Ombre tu es un nom à la merci des heures (PS, p.73).

So, Ulysses discovers the word ‘Personne’ as if it were the crucial revelation of his journey and a form of conquest (even if expression is barely sustainable at its threshold): Personne, son vrai nom, né du grand creux du ciel et de la mer, augmenté de ce rien: la parole effaçable (PS, p.74).

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The word looms again, not as abolition and nonentity, but as a more desirable identity, synonymous with the breaching of opaqueness and luminous access to the other side: Personne. Mais qui porte ce nom si beau, qui serait transparence? (PS, p.76).

This is a poem, then, which, drawn ‘vers l’à peine chair, l’à peine ombre’ (PS, p.11), breaks into a zone of superior selflessness where one becomes, as writer, that ‘homme d’étonnement / qui nous rendrait Personne et ses mirages’ (PS, p.79): bringing back from the dead and restoring to life both an ‘amie’ and oneself, the amie within one’s self, now fused in the ‘beyond the name’ and in those fluencies of vision, however inaccessible or fickle, which surround it.

BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marie-Claire Bancquart was born in 1932. Originally from Aveyron and the Pas-de-Calais, she now lives in Paris. Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the Sorbonne (Paris-IV), she is the author of numerous critical works and commentated editions on the period 1880-1914 (Maupassant, Anatole France, Huysmans), as well as on a wide variety of modern and contemporary French writers. She has published a series of major books on the presence of Paris in French literature: Paris ‘fin de siècle’, Editions de la Différence, 2002; Paris ‘Belle époque’ par ses écrivains, Adam Biro/Paris Musée, 1997; Paris des Surréalistes, Editions de la Différence, 2004; and Paris des écrivains français après 1945, Editions de la Différence, 2006. She is editor of the wide-ranging volume Poésie française 1945-1970, PUF, 1995; has produced many articles on contemporary poetry in literary journals and in the publications of conferences; and directed the international colloquium on André Frénaud at Cerisy-la-Salle in 2000 (the articles of which have been published as a book under the title André Frénaud, la négation exigeante, Editions Le Temps qu’il fait, Cognac, 2004). She contributes critical notes on new collections by present-day poets for the review Europe. The exceptional impact of her work has been recognised at the highest level by the following prestigious awards: the Grand Prix de critique de l’Académie Française, the Grand Prix de l’essai de la Ville de Paris, and the Grand Prix de l’Association des critiques littéraires. Novels: L’inquisiteur, Belfond, 1980 Les tarots d’Ulysse, Belfond, 1984 Photos de famille, François Bourin, 1988 (appearing subsequently in the ‘J’ai lu’ collection) Élise en automne, François Bourin, 1991 (selected for the Prix Renaudot, and republished later in Livre de poche) La saveur du sel, Bourin/Julliard, 1994 Une femme sans modèles, Éditions de Fallois, 1999

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Poetry: Mais, Vodaine, 1969 Projets alternés, Rougerie, 1972 Mains dissoutes, Rougerie, 1975 Cherche-terre, Saint Germain des Prés, 1977 Mémoire d’abolie, Belfond, 1978 Habiter le sel, Pierre Dalle Nogare, 1979 Partition, Belfond, 1981 Votre visage jusqu’à l’os, Temps Actuels, 1983 Opportunité des oiseaux, Belfond, 1986 Opéra des limites, José Corti, 1988 Végétales, Les Cahiers du Confluent, 1988 Sans lieu sinon l’attente, Obsidiane, 1991 Dans le feuilletage de la terre, Belfond, 1994 Énigmatiques, Obsidiane, 1995 La Vie, lieu-dit, Obsidiane/Éditions du Noroît (Quebec), 1997 La paix saignée preceded by Contrées du corps natal, Obsidiane, 1999, reprinted 2005 Rituel d’emportement, a major anthology of the poet’s work, accompanied by the previously unpublished text Qui voyage le soir, Obsidiane and Le Temps qu’il fait, 2002 Anamorphoses, Écrits des Forges (Trois-Rivières, Quebec)/Autres Temps (Marseille), 2003 Avec la mort, un quartier d’orange entre les dents, Obsidiane, 2005 Verticale du secret, Obsidiane, 2007 Works in collaboration with graphic artists: Voix, 1979 (with the engraver Marc Pessin) Mouvantes, 1991 (with Marc Pessin) Signes d’alphabet, Éditions Manière Noire, 1998 (with etchings by Jean-Louis Viard) Filigranes du corps, Éditions Manière Noire, 2004 (with engravings by Michel Roncerel) Peut-être Qui, 2005 (with engravings by Gérard Serée) Poems (with engravings by Chan-Ki Yut), 2005 Qui rature l’invisible, 2005, (poems with engravings by Augusta de Schucani and music by Alain Bancquart)

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Translations: Poems by Marie-Claire Bancquart have been translated into numerous languages (Bulgarian, English, German, Polish, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Indian, Iranian and Japanese) in various anthologies and literary journals. The whole collection Énigmatiques has been translated into English by Peter Broome, as Enigma variations, a bilingual edition published by Editions VVV, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2004 The section Paris plain-chant from Anamorphoses has been translated by Marilyn Hacker in the review Chelsea 78, New York, pp.128-141, July 2005 Musical collaborations: Married to the composer Alain Bancquart, the poet has created a dozen or so works as interactive ventures with him, these having been performed in France and abroad. One such work, Le livre du labyrinthe, has been published in the form of two recordings by Editions ‘Mode’, New York, June 2003. Poetry prizes: Marie-Claire Bancquart has been honoured with the following awards: the Prix Max Jacob, 1978; the Prix Alfred de Vigny, 1990; the Prix Supervielle, 1996; the Grand Prix d’automne de la Société des Gens de Lettres, 1999 for her work as a whole; the Grand Prix de Poésie de la Ville de Lyon (prix Kowalski), 2005; the Prix Paul Verlaine de l’Académie Française, 2006. She is also member of the judging panel for the prix Apollinaire, the prix Max-Pol Fouchet and the prix Yvan Goll, as well as a judge for several prestigious annual awards. Critical signposts: Readers may wish to consult the following publications and issues of literary journals devoted to the poet’s work: À la voix de Marie-Claire Bancquart, Éditions du Cherche-Midi, 1996 :

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Contributors : Alain Bancquart, ‘Doubles : la collaboration entre poète et musicien’, pp.7-20 Michaël Bishop, ‘Marie-Claire Bancquart : énigme et clarté’, pp.21-32 Pierre Brunel, ‘À propos d’Énigmatiques : rêverie d’un comparatiste français’, pp.33-42 Georges-Emmanuel Clancier, ‘Pour une sérénité du vivant’, pp.45-50 Dominique Grandmont, ‘L’œil limpide de Marie-Claire Bancquart’, pp.57-58 Jean Orizet, ‘Marie-Claire Bancquart : entre l’être et l’espace’, pp.61-62 Aude Préta-de Beaufort, ‘Marie-Claire Bancquart : porteuse de passages’, pp.63-86 Lionel Ray, ‘La grande figure’, pp.87-92 Jean-Claude Renard, ‘Mon amie Marie-Claire Bancquart, pp.93-97 Richard Rognet, ‘Visite à Marie-Claire Bancquart’, pp.99109 Salah Stétié, ‘Commencer par le toit’, pp.111-112 Bernard Vargaftig; ‘Une musique dans le corps’, pp.113-116 – with poetic texts by Andrée Chedid, Claude-Michel Cluny, Vahél Godel, Jean-Pierre Lemaire – and with English translations of selected poems by Martin Sorrell La Sape, No 50, December 1998: Contributors : Marie-Claire Bancquart, ‘Débroussailleuse d’ombres’ (poems), pp.10-19 Gérard Noiret, ‘Portrait déplié : Marie-Claire Bancquart’, pp.21-42 Jean-Baptiste Para, ‘Tribut’, pp.44-45 Elizabeth Lange, ‘À la recherche de personne’, pp.46-49 – with poems by Anise Koltz, Richard Rognet, Christian Doumet

Bio-Bibliography

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and translations of poems of Bancquart by Michaël Bishop (into English), by Elizabeth Lange (into German) and by Marie-Louise Lentengre (into Italian)

Autre Sud, No 9, June 2000 Contributors : Marie-Claire Bancquart, ’Comme si le matin servait toujours’ (poems), pp.11-20 Georges-Emmanuel Clancier, ‘Une ardente rigueur’, pp.6-10 Bernard Mazo, ‘Entretien avec Marie-Claire Bancquart,’ pp.23-34 Dominique Sorrente, ‘Marie-Claire Bancquart ou le tiroir des gravités’, pp.35-40 Pierre Brunel, ‘Feuillet d’Hélios’, pp.41-46 – with translations into English of poems by Bancquart by Peter Broome Nu(e), No 14, March 2001 Contributors : Marie-Claire Bancquart, ‘Corps talisman’ (a long sequence of poems), pp.25-57 Marie-Claire Bancquart and Richard Rognet, ‘Entretien’ (extended interactive interview with the poet) pp.9-19 – with drawings by Pierre Dubrunquez Poésie 2002, No 94, October 2002: Contributors : Marie-Claire Bancquart, A sequence of ten poems, pp.94-100 Marie-Claire Bancquart and Pierre Dubrunquez, ‘Le rituel d’emportement de Marie-Claire Bancquart’ (interview with the poet on the publication of the major anthology of her work), pp.86-93 Friches, No 89, Winter 2004-2005: Contributors : Marie-Claire Bancquart, Five previously unpublished poems, pp.26-31 Georges Emmanuel Clancier, ‘Rencontre’ (poem), p.7 Régine Foloppe, essay on the poetry of Marie-Claire

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Bancquart, p.8-18 Marie-Claire Bancquart and Régine Foloppe, ‘Entretien’ (interview with the poet), pp.19-25 Jean-Pierre Thuillat (director of the review), ‘Marque-pages’ (poem), p.34 – with a bibliography, pp.32-33

Interviews with the poet have appeared also in: Le Nouveau Recueil, March-May 2003, pp.162-172 Sabord, Trois-Rivières, Quebec, May 2003, pp.61-63 Littéralité, York University, Toronto, Spring 2004, pp.29-33 Arabesques, Algiers, November 2005, pp.6-15

INDEX OF PROPER NAMES

Literary and artistic Apollinaire, Guillaume: 130, 131, 154 Baudelaire, Charles: 15, 27, 61, 104, 105, 108, 111, 123, 126, 165, 173, 200, 217, 219, 220, 224, 247 Bergson, Henri: 62 Dali, Salvador: 113 Dante, Alighieri: 212, 220 Duras, Marguerite: 227 Eliot, Thomas Stearns: 73 Eluard, Paul: 120 Frénaud, André: 28, 43, 48, 63, 73, 120, 127, 131, 149, 196, 197, 201, 220 Gautier, Théophile: 74 Huysmans, Joris-Karl: 62 Kafka, Franz: 161, 168, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182 Keats, John: 244 Mallarmé, Stéphane: 52, 67, 74, 75, 174 Michaux, Henri: 28, 32, 33, 61, 70, 102, 113, 120, 134, 202, 236 Monet, Claude: 18 Nerval, Gérard de: 27, 35 Pancino, Biagio: 20 Pascal, Blaise: 61, 62 Ponge, Francis: 62, 63, 134 Proust, Marcel: 207, 208 Rimbaud, Arthur: 27, 28, 37, 39, 40, 42, 44, 52, 65, 124, 125, 129, 130, 173, 199, 257 Rodin, Auguste: 223 Schubert, Franz: 232, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251 Shakespeare, William: 71, 118, 130 Thomas, Dylan: 237 Villon, François: 192, 220

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Mythological Apollo: 17 Ariadne: 17, 127, 203 Artemis: 145, 146 Charon: 81 Daphne: 17 Electra: 17 Eurydice: 17, 101, 108, 112, 118 Hercules: 106, 182 Icarus: 20, 258 Ixion: 17, 107, 119 Medusa: 146 Minotaur: 17 Mnemosyne: 120 Narcissus: 12, 18 Œdipus: 17 Orestes: 17, 109 Orpheus: 17, 64, 101, 108, 112, 118, 147 Phœnix: 246 Prometheus: 132 Sisyphus: 100, 240 Ulysses: 247, 255, 256, 262