2024-01-08 10:56:30
The novelist and children’s author sings of mother earth in a first organic and invigorating collection.
Every week, a look at the latest poetry news. Find all the articles from this meeting here.
We knew Marie Pavlenko as a novelist, children’s and comics author. We discover her as a poet in the Jeunes Plumes collection by publisher Bruno Doucey. At the start of the year, the multi-award-winning writer wrote her first collection, Main River, an invigorating ode to Mother Earth where the poetry evokes here “a crazy fiery stream / with a hundred thousand languages”, or there “a wind lazy” who “hardly rides birds”. So many animal, vegetable or mineral manifestations which beat in chorus to produce soft, healthy verses, in short which heal their reader, do them good. Because there is indeed something of the order of care (“care”) in this bias towards the living with “child’s eyes”.
Against the deadly world of adults, which leads to the destruction of ecosystems, Marie Pavlenko chooses the carefree – but sometimes cruel – vigor of Gaia, as a reminiscence of childhood. See this short poem: “The drizzle / caresses the hair of the world / and coats it with its love / passing through the sweaters” or this other extract: “Cut into cubes / the plane trees cry / at night they dream / of hills / where would grow their roots. It is therefore not surprising that some of the texts take on the melodic trappings of the nursery rhyme (“on camelback / we will go to the woods / to meet wolves / and scoundrels / rapier in hand / lace jabot / we will go to the wood / kill scoundrels / small fry”), the ballad or the lullaby, with which the children’s author is necessarily familiar. They then serve to resonate the pulsations of a maternal, organic, ecological but, above all, vital poetry.
The river hand of Marie Pavlenko, ed. Bruno Doucey, 120 pp., 15 euros.
The extract
I want to be cradled in the big arms of the world
follow the circaete towards the top of the voices
dreaming of the white race of swallows in summer
listen to the frog
sink into the ivy
whose golden breath
is the murmur of water
when you sleep next to
#Marie #Pavlenko #life #love #Libération