Notebook of Roses and Civilization

by Nicole Brossard, Erín Moure (Editor), Robert Majzels (Translation)

The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade – in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning.

Nicole Brossard, one of the world’s foremost literary innovators, is known for her experiments with language and her groundbreaking treatment of desire and gender. This dextrous translation by the award-winning poets and translators Erin Moure (Little Theatres) and Robert Majzels (Apikoros Sleuth) brings into English, with great verve and sensitivity, Brossard’s remarkable syntax and sensuality.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 14, 2003

About the author

Born in Montreal (Quebec), poet, novelist and essayist Nicole Brossard published her first book in 1965. In 1965 she cofounded the influential literary magazine La Barre du Jour and in 1976 she codirected the film Some American Femnists. She has published eight novels including Picture Theory, Mauve Desert, Baroque at Dawn, an essay "The Aerial Letter" and many books of poetry including Daydream Mechanics, Lovhers, Typhon dru, Installations, Musee de l'os et de l'eau. She has won the Governor General award twice for her poetry (1974, 1984) and Le Grand Prix de Poesie de la Foundation les Forges in 1989 and 1999. Le Prix Athanase-David, which is for a lifetime of literary acheivement, was attributed to her in 1991. That same year she received the The Harbourfront Festival Prize. In 1994, she was made a member of L'Academie des Lettres du Quebec. Her work has been widely translated and anthologized. Mauve Desert and Baroque at Dawn have been translated into Spanish. In 1998 she published a bilingual edition of an autofiction essay titled She would be the first sentence of my new novel/Elle serait la premiere phrase de mon prochain roman(1998). In 1989, a book of her poetry in translation, Installations, was released, translated by Erin Moure and Robert Majzels. Nicole Brossard lives in Montreal.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notebook of Roses and Civilization is divided into six parts: "Apparition of Objects", "Soft Link 1", "Notebook of Roses and Civilization", "Soft Link 2", "Blue Float of Days", and "Soft Link 3"...

from "Apparition of Objects"...

winter water blue melt backlit
life suddenly in thin chemise
steadfast
in questions and old silences

in the puzzle of proper nouns
and barking city: February
slow eyelashes that beckon to love
and spinning tops

foliage of word for word
gentleness that evades meaning
plunge into the dark
with metronome

- pg. 6

* * *

the lemon the martini the olive
all that amuses
then came night with its lampshades
describe the light
touch tomorrow

the immense everyday furled in the iris
a morning
of found orchids

- pg. 15

from "Notebook of Roses and Civilization"...

poem to understand how
people bend
before an idea
their hair barely brushing the depth of silence

still some days still i
add bits onto the substance
of faces. Necklace of memory
and of animal torn from the abyss.
Seen from behind, necklace: verb to be.

- pg. 20

* * *

to the dawn add i am
in the middle
bite marks and certainty:
we all need
seashells and reality

the tongue rarely
approaches dawn
without a sob

- pg. 29

* * *

all this that wasn't a story
to begin again
it's the whole being that yields marvellously

end of a dream at the ends of the earth
war took
root in the morning dew
rip through the wind, all the arrows

- pg. 41

* * *

from tomorrow onwards i am
plunged into the unthinkable
immense dawn
nobody and yet
au revoir perhaps
the universe is strikingly beautiful
night shadow or dust

renaissance ideas
while inventing
future at the nape of the neck
the lightness of the luminous shores
all this that knocks
on the root of the sky. Above all calculate
the background noise of characters

- pg. 50

from "Blue Float of Days"...

you always think it's fine
to count the words. Then you go quiet
before all the deletions
and denouements, you
plunge into silence toward its underlying
truth quick it'll have resurfaced
like an insect in the pool

- pg. 60

* * *

finally in the midst of a living tongue
well irrigated i'll have
such momentum at my fingertips
we could call it
theatre with petals
humanity's days numbered
or apparition of objects
then come the conflagrations

- pg. 79

[nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

reading lèvres micro
i know the answer
poems that demand we open
the fire the heart: devour me

-

It's written down with bruises, abundance of life burst to fullness in a world and its niches of worn paths that lick at the shadow of bones.

-

the idea that there are
inconsolable centres
in the middle of the chest
while we keep on
coping
a notebook of roses
under the arm