architecture of meaning

Montreal author Nicole Brossard's book of poetry (translated into English is entitled Notebook of Roses and Civilization), Cahier de roses et de Civilization, explores the movement of language and gender through language and the lyric abstract in both French and English. 

What is it about her language that overcomes, like a slow wave, sweeping in and drowning you? What is it about her language that makes you welcome the process of being overcome?

..once again the exact time the street
the cigarette we don’t light
again the time the sex of lips
existence silence that deafens
another metamorphosis
arms open

'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 dexterous translation brings into English, with great verve and sensitivity, Brossard's remarkable syntax, sadness, and sensuality.'

Brossard's book does not include the French text, but the two translators, Rober Majzels and Erin Moure are experienced and the monolingual writer can trust them. The language moves confidently, flowing without obvious transitions over a range of themes: beauty, love, language, war. The rose is associated with nature and passion, civilization mostly with war and power. Three "Softlinks," prose poems dispersed throughout the book, offer the reader some ways into the meanings of the elusive lyrics that make up most of the work. Brossard is perhaps referring to the SoftLink library automation systems: libraries, repositories of the word, contain much of what is good in civilization. The outer world, the poems tell us, is not only a world of natural beauty but also the realm of men with "eyes of Kalashnikovs." 

The second "Softlink" decries the power of men in white shirts who traffic in weapons, and trade women and children. This is the darkside of civilization. Yet the urban, the core of civilization, can be associated with the erotic: the speaker remembers the '80s in Chez Madame Arthur, a famous Paris nightclub where "women wrapped their arms around / nights of ink and dawn."

If there is any resolution of the dichotomies of the rose and civilization, it lies in the words, which are treated in "Softlink 3" not as mere signs but as real entities. Any word, any language. In a passage that calls to mind Rilke's "Ninth Duino Elegy," which says we are here to affirm being through words, Brossard summons up the sorts of words that drive and haunt us: names of places and people, of cherished objects, words of pleasure and pain, words that "shoot up before our very eyes like cloned shadows replete with light and great myths." The word is entangled with civilization and its discontents, but also preserves and exalts the realm of the rose.