Distantly

cities where you’re always close
to someone standing among the archives
to recapture her mother’s face
in a stroke of memory and horizon

Translators Sylvain Gallais and Cynthia Hogue introduce Nicole Brossard as a writer “at the forefront of the dynamic Québécois feminist, lesbian, and avant-garde writing communities,” who has published more than 50 books in various genres. In reference to the title of her latest collection, Distantly—lointaines, in French—Gallais and Hogue quote Brossard’s author’s note: “Distantly is doubtless the best translation I can offer for the words horizon and breakers, each gathering momentum and marking a space far beyond elsewhere and ardor.” 

The title of each poem begins with the word “city” or “cities,” and the collection is animated by the tension between a distant horizon, an “elsewhere” that affords a broad perspective on our times and the immediacy of city life. Brossard offers glimpses of people together, flashes of “civilization” in rapid succession, at times wondrous and sensual, like in “Cities with their oysters”:

I know how to relish the oyster and its salt-fresh claire

and at times threatening and violent:

long knives and slender necks of young girls

In the final poem, “Cities where my face returns,” Brossard gestures toward optimism, describing “cities with hope in the crosshairs of sobs,” and writing of herself:

I breathe slowly
a life of frescoed words : 
women wrapped in the joy of wandering and infinity

Still, an atmosphere of sadness, a mourning for the ways we, as humans, have failed one another, pervades the work, characterized by these lines from “Cities without names”:

cities because we’re honest
with our shadows of a new world
buried deep in time and feeling
cities filled with our odors at world’s end

Perhaps Brossard is that “someone standing among the archives” of life on Earth, one whose poetry forms a kind of “memory,” or “horizon.”