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Water and Bone Museum
Nicole Brossard
Muse de los et de l'eau. Editions du Noroit / Cadex editions 95 FF
A playful, exploratory focus on language has motivated Nicole Brossard's writing since Aube a la saison (1965), and her most recent collection of poetry, winner of the Grand Prix du Festival International de la Poasie in 1999, takes that exploration further again. Musee de l'os et de l'eau is vintage Brossard. Like previous works such as Le Centre blanc (1970), Picture Theory (1982) or Installations (1989), it operates out of a central and symbolic metaphor that intensifies in significance as it is reiterated across the length of the text, evoking emotion, provoking thought, and creating a rich fabric for rereading. In Musee de l'os et de l'eau that central metaphor is the museum, the "temple of the muses," here primarily signifying the human body, constructed of water and bone, and housing the extraordinary artifact which is living language. This is not Leonardo's human (masculine) body, inscribed in its perfect circle, nor is it the amorous body of Brossard's earlier work, but rather it is the human (female) body woven into a fabric of place and time, on the earth and in history.
History and human culture, archives of bones, beauty, violent acts and language weigh heavily in these poems. The living body, fragile and in permanent dialectic with this enormity, confronts mortality while its treasure of words metamorphoses into more permanent forms such as books. Dense, enigmatic and intense, these poems have affinities...