But it asks at the outset a jarring question: “who said that to burn / relieves matter or emptiness” (7)? It’s a question that keeps up Brossard’s typical complication of an existence divided too easily between the concrete and the abstract. The book - beautifully translated by Angela Carr, another poet out of Montréal - offers the “fleeting silk of dawn and joy” (31) felt by a speaker who tells us they “like any night that moves the knees” (94).
So Brossard’s ardour has a “scarlet mouth bursting with names” (13), a mouth that colors not just from the flush of a kiss but from the “pastel soul tint” of lovers who “try to side with the sobbing / immerse our ardour / in questions and cherries” (12). Her language holds life by the scruff - at that point, both vulnerable and resilient, where the head clasps the trunk.
ARDOUR REVIEW SERIES
Indeed, the middle section of the book, a series of twenty-nine numbered “napes,” provides a suggestive term for the poetics Brossard has developed over the last fifty years.
ARDOUR REVIEW FULL
The book is full of phrases that expose the joint between object and idea: following Brossard, we find ourselves here in the “foliage of words,” there in a “pit of words” (15), nowhere just in words. The emphasis Brossard has long placed on one’s material life in language makes ardour, which burns in the mind and in the body, seem natural, even perhaps essential in her lexicon. With her latest book of poems, Nicole Brossard enters into the history of this word. These are the tales of earnest young men (and, of course, of Nabokov). A budding philosopher applies himself with ardour to his studies godly ardour brings a congregation to prayerful reflection a defeat in battle cools a would-be soldier’s military ardour but only the end of the summer cools the ardour of teen lovers. When I read for “ardour” online, the books at the top of the list my search returns are religious, moral, martial. In these stories a girlish face turns upward to receive a kiss it is the kiss that is imposed with ardour, the girl’s lover who is ardent. When I think of reading it, I recall English novels. It’s a word I rarely use or hear spoken in conversation. Ardour: the flame of desire a spiritual, sexual, or physical burning a passion that the OED tells us now connotes only “generous or noble impulses” though once it could speak of evil.
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