“It’s me, come on, come on, poor old man! Do not be afraid. The time has come.” What can the poet do in the face of impending death “in the cold season”, quietly the tip of his scythe, and under the white blanket of snow? Thinking about one’s own destiny, mixing words, images and idioms, irony and fear, but also a form of benevolence towards one’s own carcass and writing from the distillate, always writing, poems in prose about waiting. Jean-Michel Maulpoix, in love with melancholy for 70 years, shares this research in his latest collection at the Mercure de France, the garden under the snow, on bookstore shelves since the beginning of March. It is the sequel to two works published since 2017 and is based on a “critical lyric”, with highly subjective affects and a sense of prosody, which the writer and scientist himself outlines as a theory.
And when, in the twilight of him “Paper Life”the poet, who was crowned last year with the Goncourt for poetry for his work (more than thirty books, mainly collections and critical essays on poetry), sings of his own physical, moral and verbal “decrepitude” (“It’s poor language that seems intentionally made for sadness. A winter tongue, in white and black, with fewer nuances, resigned to speaking softly, he writes), his song is no less calm or soothing. Because at the end of the tunnel – or at the gate to hell – there is always a light: spring. And she directs her steps to the white and felted carpet of winter coming into the garden. It is charged with memories and a certainly faltering memory for consolation. Once again ? “It goes on, when you try to perceive the stillness of the snow, you can hear the spring rush that love makes in your heart.”
The extract
“We’re leaving, we’re saying goodbye. It’s too cold in this eternal winter. We’ll live somewhere else. At the neighbor’s, under wide arbours, far, far away, like a bohemian, in a mountain village where heavy bells ring, right where the birds drink, under the golden lemon trees… To be honest we’d like to disappear, without leaving an address. In the dust, in the smoke. As a remainder of the word. We call in vain in the night: only the silence of the shadows answers. Who does it belong to, this cardboard, stone or wooden body lying on its back, hands clasped, level with a white rectangle? From what eternity does he learn? Only flowers are missing!”
