Seizing: Places by Hélène Dorion, translated by Patrick McGuinness (Arc, 2012), second selection

I'd like to begin my second and final set of selections from Hélène Dorion's Seizing: Places with two quotations from Patrick McGuinness's excellent introduction:

"Though Dorion's poetry has evolved, it has always been limpid and intense, sophisticated in its thinking but elemental in its feel for the world. It is also emphatic about poetry's role in knowing that world, in putting the world to words not in order to name it, pin it down and categorise it, but because expressing the world is also to experience it."

"'Writing does not protect me from life's turbulence, but rather takes me to its most precarious points of equilibrium, where the sense of provisionality is at its sharpest', she writes in her essay, 'The Poem's Detail'."

And now for passages from the poems:

                              Listen
to the years echoing behind you 
the storm blurs your vision, your hands
reach only for this furious past.
Everything is red, will soon be mauve.

*

You see the path: long rays
where the dramatis personae of your
unfinished lives are jostling. In your mouth
jaws suddenly close
on one of them.

*

You open the box where memory stirs.
...one by one, you find the stories again
--a crowd of images
fastens itself to every object. 

*

                                                    You open
a window and we breathe
the tiny leaves, branches, buds.

*

In Gursky's library
you turn the last page, it's the end
of the book, the world that's now contained
between the covers 
opens out then violently
shuts again on paths
you'll never tread
except in that rich
undefeated world of your books.
But each time, each time
your life will grow larger.

*

--so long as you hold
words in your hands
the garden where tonight, as every night
you open yourself to the wind's passage
will tell you what life really is.

from "Seizing: Windows"

Over the hill, a reddened

cloud grips that hour

when the soul settles--

and disperses.

As into myself, I enter

the cracked heart of dusk.

*

...slow cavities of hours.

*

Already the bank was fading

behind us, and far away, the brief

space where dream surges up.

*

          ...which 

is the place that is not a place

but that holds them all.

*

And for us the frail shelter invents

houses of fire and castles of sounds.

*

                                Each life

scatters its light

across time's room.

from "Seizing: Faces"

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