In the Flesh of the Text: The Poetry of Marie-Claire Bancquart (review)

Marie-Claire Bancquart's four decades of poetic creativity have yielded an unfinishable quest deeply attuned to the fleeting rhythms and wordless bursts of enigma that for ever unsettle and erode any attempted mapping of a public or private self. From Mains dissoutes (1975) and Votre visage jusqu'à I'os (1983) through to Énigmatiques (1995) and Verticale du secret (2007), hers is an adventure of at once passingness and endurance, exile and celebration, unknowingness and sensual delectation, a vast project wherein being remains, as one of her preferred poets, André Frénaud, would also have it, 'toujours en route', 'toujours en question'. Peter Broome's decision to devote each of the seven chapters of his monograph to a single poem extracted from different major collections leads us indeed into the flesh of her text or, as the critic himself elaborates, 'its visceral textures, its multi-directional circuits, its metabolisms and wayward orientations' (p. 21). Rigour of focus furthers an ambitious venture upstream eager to embrace the unfolding stages of a metamorphic act that, unpredictable, fitful and provisional, is grasped as a doing simultaneously driven by its own unmaking. Pinpointing semantic slippage, minimal inflection of tone, or unobtrusive modification of rhythm or sound, Broome masterfully tracks Bancquart's fluencies of vision and the revigorating pulses of meaning they intermittently release through the fragmented body of the poem. Highlighting a poetics of oscillation and inbetweenness, a writing where myth is wedded to incarnation and collapsed chronology releases slow-breathing possibilities untouched by age, the sum of his close readings opens up a multitude of fascinating angles and vistas that amply capture Bancquart's art of plumbing the resistances of the human interior and of wresting an improbable verbal succulence from all that might have become congealed or dessicated therein. This is the first extended exploration of Bancquart's poetry, one that pursues with equal measures of passion and precision the subtle twists and turns, the sensual unruliness, the fiercely willed reversibility, the trembling thresholds that all characterize her forays into a tenebrous and endlessly tentative geography of the self — her desire to penetrate, if only ever in part, the mystery of woman's precarious presence in the world. Broome's study confirms Bancquart's status as one of the most powerful and challenging women poets writing in France today. Perhaps just as importantly, the great acumen and energy of his critical enterprise continue to champion the inestimable delights of engaging with the fertile puzzle of poetic language, whether in its boldest or most delicate manifestations.