La Poésie québécoise des origines à nos jours: Anthologie by Laurent Mailhot, Pierre Nepveu (review)

478 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 should almost totally ignore them in his study of a work steeped in class hatred and alienation. Cecile Cloutier focusses on Roch Carrier's La Guerre yes sir and Victor-Levy Beaulieu's Un reveqUl!becois.The poet and critic merge in what is sometimes a piece of automatic writing. There are good insights, but also some contradictions, lack of clarity, and substitution of Berube (La Guerre) for Barthelemy (Un revel at one point. Catherine Rubinger's 'Violence and Children in L'Avaliedes avales,' too, has it moments, but it is perhaps overweighed by quotations and weakened by lack of clarity. She just touches on - but expresses very well, in relation to Nelligan's presence in the novel in question - possible allegorical dimensions of Ducharme's writing. Probably the most original study in this collection (as far as Frenchlanguage writing is concerned) is Barbara Godard's 'Blais's La Belle Bete: Infernal Fairy-Tale.' Perhaps the most detailed study in print of MarieClaire Blais's first novel, this text analyses that author's inversion of traditional structures of the genre noted in the title, solidly supported by pertinent critical readings. Godard also projects her findings, briefly, on other Blais works, suggesting recurring configurations. Impressive, too, is Godard's highlighting of intertextual elements in La Belle Bete, with particular reference to Thomas Mann, Anne Hebert, and Charles Perrault. One is glad that those responsible for the non-colloquium on violence in the Canadian novel decided to publish the projected papers all the same. Yet one would have been happier had the editors proofread more carefully, so that 'seduced' had not become 'reduced' (p 9) and 'Jeanne d'Arc' 'Jeanne d'art'(!) (p 141), not to speak of the plethora of errors in French. Also, it is unfortunate that Virginia Harger-Grinling and Terry Goldie did not take the opportunity to pick up in their introductions the strands of the implicit debate that develops between the texts (e.g., on sexual violence in the Quebec novel, and on Leonard Cohen, The Wars, and the fictional repression of historical violence in English-Canadian writing). The four publications reviewed here, then, have a number of faults in the eyes of this reviewer. Yet there is no question that their existence will enhance our knowledge of (especially) Quebec writing and stimulate debate and reflection on the relationship between the texte and the hors-texte. (B.-Z. SHEK) Laurent Mailhot and Pierre Nepveu. La Poesie qutbecoise des origines d nos jours: Anthologie Presses de I'Universite du Quebec I L'Hexagone. 7'4. $31.70 A major publishingevent in Quebec letters, this most comprehensive and HUMANITIES 479 most varied anthology presents 272 poets and 525 texts from Marc Lescarbot (b 1570) to Marie Uguay (b 1955, d 1981). The prominent poet-engraver, Roland Giguere, has tastefully designed the entire book. He has adorned the front and back covers with an ink drawing which, by its lyrical abstractionism, seems to suggest the burgeoning of poetic expression in Quebec. The book contains some 300 illustrations and photographs, most notably covers of collections of verse. These are especially revealing, giving the reader a feeling for the time and nature of the work in question through a key aspect of its materiality (a current preoccupation of the aesthetics of poetry). The Mailhot-Nepveu anthology is not only chronologically the most up to date (the previous ones by Guy Sylvestre and Alain Bosquet stopped around 1965) but also, by its approach, the most innovative. There is, for example, an important re-evaluation of poetic production in the long period up to the appearance of Saint-Denys Garneau. The editors write in their preface: 'Sauvegarder un patrimoine national n'a pas ete notre principale preoccupation. Sans balayer toute perspective historique, ce qui aurait ete en l'occurrence absurde, nous avons d'abord voulu retenir ce qui subsistait de plus vivant dans la poesie du passe. Aussi n'avonsnous pas hesite ... Ii accorder moins de place it certaines vedettes ... notre lecture a d'abord eM guide par la qualite intrinseque des poemes: l'activite de leur ecriture, la complexite de leur thematique, la vigueur de I'imagination qui...