Particulités / Daniel Lavoie (Les Éditions des Plaines, 2015)

Je ne lis pas les poètes, j’écoute le ciel

(Daniel Lavoie, Particulités)

As bizarre as it might seem to review a book of French language poetry in English, I will do exactly that, although it is very difficult to find an English equivalent even for the book's main tonality, la tristesse. Not quite sadness, but rather a dark tint, a beautiful melancholy. Forget everything you know about Daniel Lavoie the entertainer, with his trademark sunny smile. The narrator of Particulités is disillusioned and detached as he dissects the Universe’s mechanics, awe-inspiring and mysterious, the work of a great higher consciousness. When the narrator then descends back to Earth he observes it almost as a stranger, who despite all the vain and cruel ways of humanity, through the mundane details of everyday life senses a higher light seeking transcendence through people, nature and art (“Je sais qu’un dieu séculier cherche, à travers moi, les mots pour me dire qu’il est là” - bulletin). 

This philosophical detachment can be shocking at times - after all, in this poetic system there is quite logically no hierarchy of what is important and what is unimportant, and so whatever comes in life - good or bad – makes no difference: music, pain, sex, death... whatever. However, the author's passionate empathy for humankind is palpable (james, finutilité), and so is his close relationship with nature, which offers its most precious gifts – peace and priceless silence (“Dans ce monde ou tout va trop vite, les kilomètres à pied sont un réconfort que les riches ne peuvent pas acheter” - rose du désert).

But enough of the “whats”, on to the “hows”.

The vertiginous changes in the scale of subjects (from cosmogony to fleeting sensations) and images (from the surrealistic to the intimate), the homeopathic use of humor, sarcasm and eroticism, the encyclopedic knowledge of plants and birds, the cult of silence, the persistent interest in the idea of finality, the microscopic vision, the elegance of thought and expression and the musicality of the verse to me are the signature traits of Lavoie’s poetry. I particularly like the texts in which the author "describes the indescribable", captures those elusive things that cannot be expressed by ordinary human language, but only by poetry (the birth of music in l'odeur des doigts, the acute sense of time passing in les outardes, the “banal chaos” of the moment in poème 4, etc.). 

Lavoie's Particulités is one of those poetic works that have such a strong and original vision they change my own perspective a little. And that, of course, is why I read poetry.

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* For my review of Lavoie's first book of poetry Finutilité, peek here.