Poetry
Regards et jeux dans l'espace
Synopsis
Twenty-eight free-verse poems, divided into sections: Jeux, Enfants, Esquisses en plein air, Deux paysages, De gris en plus noir, Sans titre. The collection opens on a child building a village out of wooden blocks, an image of the poem as play. Then come children climbing aspens, willows, elms, pines seen against the light. Then the tone darkens: boredom, a house closed up for the winter, a man who calls himself a cage of bones.
Context
The collection appeared in Montreal in March 1937, at the author's expense, in a print run of one thousand copies; its author was twenty-four. The reception was rather favourable, with the exception of a mocking article by Claude-Henri Grignon against free verse, but the book sold very little. The author took back the unsold copies from the booksellers and burned some of them. His friends Robert Élie and Jean Le Moyne published his Complete Poems in 1949, and his journal appeared in 1954.
Who it is for
A short collection in simple language; the first pieces are games, and the later ones grow darker as one reads on.
Prizes and reception
The only book published in its author's lifetime; he is often regarded, according to Le Devoir, as the first poet of modernity in Quebec.
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