Curs, comme livres d'amour

70 World Literature Today reviews Jerusalem,” the magnificent opening poem, encourage us to contemplate our own moment, which may also be seen as a site of change: within it, an older dispensation is still present, but a newly secular, “deconsecrated” reality is our current dwelling. Likewise , the legacy of the Irish civil war is still alive, but in a new present. These poems insist that past identities are not shed like skins, but that they persevere like omnipresent, half-forgotten specters. Echoes of Seamus Heaney can be heard throughout the volume, perhaps unsurprisingly so, since the elder poet’s interest in excavating an identity both personal and cultural —and doing so both diachronically, with a view to the long sweep of history , and synchronically, at precisely evoked moments rich with detail—is powerfully influential. So is Yeats, of course, whose phrases can be heard. Clifton engages public history but also knows how to cherish moments when time and space seem to collapse , and when the mind allows sensation to govern thought. Disinheritance and defeat are conditions that are not only political , and while Clifton’s poems attend closely to their temporal moment, they are not stifled by it. His understanding of identity is historical but not always individual: the lyric self slides rather smoothly into a plural “we.” Yet here is where the reader sometimes longs for more concreteness , more idiosyncrasy—one wants to encounter a human self, a personality . Even Yeats allowed himself to dwell within specific, individual emotions , and these are often unclear or evanescent in Clifton’s work. Its complex lyrical explorations of the unsolved mysteries of origin, loss, remembrance, and recurrence are enough of a gift to offer readers, though. The poet asks if he cannot find sacredness alive and flourishing , and if it cannot be beautiful and good; only a hardened cynic would say no. Magdalena Kay University of Victoria, B.C. Hélène Dorion. Cœurs, comme livres d’amour. Montréal. Editions de l’Hexagone. 2012. isbn 9782896480067 A modern-day troubadour, Hélène Dorion stands outside linear, dualistic thinking in order to examine the existential and physical states of the heart. At the core of Cœurs, comme livres d’amour, is the heart’s power to transform, its gift of life. We sit with Rilke before the “curtain of the heart” to see its concealed “reflection , echo, perhaps illusory presence .” The heart provides a warm and happy place of rest, where to park lovers’ silences, a counterpoint to violence. But it is also a dark stain, blood-filled, self-contained, a rock whose heavy presence is the matrix of the infinite, a minuscule island, a fragile truth, transforming fire, wound. More importantly, it is the alpha and omega of seasons, desire, Piero Ribelli 50 Main Street: The Face of America Cameron + Company In this coffee-table book filled with vivid photography, Ribelli tells the stories of people who live at 50 Main Street in each of America’s states. These stories weave together the diverse individuality and universal themes of America and its people, from Jack Ellwood, a book collector in Mesa, Arizona, to Cynthia Jones, who owns a salon in New Britain, Connecticut. Pascal Quignard The Roving Shadows Chris Turner, tr. Seagull Books Les Ombres errantes was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2002. The book is impossible to classify according to genre, mixing fragments of history, fiction, music, aphorism, and more. The resulting collage is an inspired literary tapestry. Pascal Quignard is recognized as one of France’s most innovative and influential writers (see WLT, July 2003, 122). january–february 2013 • 71 Nota Bene breath, sounds, light, happiness; it is altogether enigma, resemblance, symmetry, and false pretenses. It points to the meeting place of wave and shore, flower and dawn, window and landscape. It is a border that points to a journey, where words begin: “I enter / inside the poem / that wills itself on a long journey / to meet what only / time may greet.” Caught within this grand drama, lovers are meditative, almost disincarnate figures, segues to the outer world, tangible yet vanishing signs of a renewed relationship with the world. They appear to become almost one

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