What’s this ?
Few writers who manage like him to embrace, in the same movement, the suffering and the joy of living. Christophe Manon publishes a new collection, Provisional, marked on the one hand by a desire to assume a lyricism that would embrace the entire human condition and on the other by the general sobriety of its form – even if the five parts that compose it each have their own coherence. There are short poems, which fit on a single page, often on half, without punctuation or almost but pulsed by the rhythm.
Besides, it would be a pity for the reader not to make a short pause at the end of each verse, because that is how he will best enjoy the particular scansion of these poems which unravel the natural composition of the sentence. “Sometimes the light burns / the pupils and its brightness / yet it stirs the desire in us / attracts that it is thus none / defends itself from it […]»
Songs of the ephemeral and of eternity, these Provisional bring together in these five parts memories, notations on death, rupture, love, a life that unfolds. Nothing melancholy here. Rather, attentive listening to the force that allows us to be “happy among the ghosts”.
Who is it ?
Christophe Manon was born in 1971 in Bordeaux. Among his extensive bibliography are the will (which we rank in the list of ten books to read to discover today’s poetry) Extreme and brightat Verdier, Vie & Opinions de Gottfried Gröll(Last Telegram).
The extract
at the high hour when we hang out with ourselves
his ghost in turmoil that bends
in the tumult of impatient air with
for only luggage a long wake
emergencies maybe also some
profane and fragile epiphanies
comes the desire to sing not
the things of the night nor even the night but
the omen of vibrant moments because if necessary
in the end to be no more than a carved name
in stone and two dates as much to say what-
how rare are the graces and the beauty of the world