Six years after the publication of her most recent collection, The Smallest Space, and a few essays, Louise Warren returns to poetry following the line of uncertainty. A book nourished by the doubts among which the writer moves and is moved by the slightest thrill of the world.
In the simplicity of her writing, Louise Warren gives each word a real density, a unique vibration. She seizes these fragilities, tremors and movements of all kinds to see lines of fracture. But if the words are right, the doubt persists since everything changes all the time. Thus, the poet experiences “disquiet in the face of harshness” which shakes souls.
Surprise awaits him, fortunately, at every turn of existence. It is a constant back and forth between her “perfect pitch” as an artist and nature as well as the world that sounds around her. Each of the poems resonates in tune with its attentive listening: the ground recedes, the light lifts the shapes, the brambles pierce the air, the iceberg speaks, the rock becomes presence, the snow amplifies, the traces speak reality.
As with all of us, grief has accumulated over the pandemic years. The news then makes a rare breakthrough in its poetry. It appears in a text which nevertheless finds a kind of comfort in simple everyday gestures: “fears/intensities/plots/the diseases of the century//I give water/clover/to my days”.
Louise Warren, a true balancing act of sensations, takes a path that is never perfectly clear, without losing her footing. Between certainties and uncertainties. Language, words, writing remain his faithful accomplices which allow him to search tirelessly in order to arrive at drawing a “form to appease himself”.
The next few lines, “through the stars/the waves spin//you open a book/hear/your heart beat”, confirm that literature, and also the visual arts, has always allowed him to translate life. The creations of other artists guide her in a friendly way towards a (in)certain serenity. This is evidenced by the magnificent graphite drawing by Julie Bénédicte Lambert on the cover, also in movement.
In fact, Louise Warren likes workshops and working on the material. Little commented on last year, his magnificent box set also published at Noroît, Vivaces, is a mobile reading and writing workshop in 9 movements and 99 cards which introduce us to the “inner theater” of anyone who knows how to share his sensitive quest and will carry , with it, “the sacred urn of the poem.”
