Featured Book Review: Museum of Bone and Water by Nicole Brossard

By Judith Fitzgerald Mar 12, 2008, 10:29 GMT

Born in Montréal in 1943, Nicole Brossard is, arguably, Canada's greatest living poet.

In some ineffable way, la femme française celebrates the world's necessary appearance while whole-heartedly accepting the contours of its existence in the workshop of po-mo indifference to unearth new ways to praise creation. The highly disciplined pre-post-modern poet (Lovhers, Daydream Mechanics), novelist (Picture Theory, Mauve Desert), critical theorist (The Aerial Letter), and co-founder of the homotextual La barre du jour successfully examines notions circumscribing mothers, lovers, oceans, demons, sluts, belief, and martyrs in view of the universal she elects to excavate (from Key West to Dublin to Montréal to Madrid). Eloquently. Effortlessly. Avec jouissance.

Too, in both her overt and submerged metaphoric illustrations of the world through the eyes of say, Woolf, Sappho, or Borges, the poet slyly reveals the capacious imaginarium of her seer-view mirror. Is it la mère, la mer, ma mer ou notre mare? Mais, oui. All of the above. As such, Museum of Bone and Water bears not only upon its excursions into reliquaries of water and bone, repositories of hope and great beauty as well as reminders of faith and authenticity, it also bears upon our bodies — of flesh, writing, water, work, etc. — and the blows inflicted upon them. Consider, for example, The Silence of the Hibiscus," a gorgeous demonstration of Brossard's mercurial mind fluttering among rigorous shifts and luminous shapes to capture the final spectacle of la solitude humaine as well as the final fact of civilisation's crumbling walls when "Someone invents a silence / in our very nature."

Implicitly situated at the deictic's urgent centre, the inveterate seer's socio-political ruminations internalise the provocative and universalise the evocative, "the loves of lives and cities lodged in the pattern of bone" or "the art of people and of bones entangled."

Most writing probes the value of historical accuracy vis-à-vis memory, spirituality, and the body electronic. Containing neither dainty sigh nor saintly swoon, Brossard's writing both challenges and rewards careful readers. Salutary, exotic, exquisitely searing in their compressed bedazzlement, the robust fruits of Brossard's various labours prove she is, indeedly, Canada's greatest living poet. (Cher Dieu, nous pouvons seulement espérer et prier ceci vient pour passer.)

Canadian poet and literary critic Judith Fitzgerald's critically acclaimed Adagios Quartet's BOOK III: Electra's Benison has just been named one of The Globe and Mail's TOP 100 BOOKS (2007).