La Question du lieu en poésie du surréalisme jusqu'à nos jours (review)

In her bid to probe the abiding concern with place that underpins many of the major poetic works published in France over the past eighty years or so, Christine Dupouy has produced an open, insightful study whose panoramic breadth is counterbalanced by precise critical assessments of individual practices and perspectives. The legacy of surrealism is repeatedly considered, as is the influence of Heidegger's thought, but the poetry of place is presented neither as a trenchant reaction against the former (Réda's urban wanderings are predicated on chance and enigma) nor as a straightforward championing of the latter (the philosopher is one companion among many, his reflections on place inspired, after all, by poetry itself). Indeed, as she explores spatial, temporal, sacred, political and perceptual aspects of place, Dupouy eschews any neat alignment of poetic voices and values, attentive certainly to echoes and resonances, but mindful too of all that separates Char from Jaccottet, or Jabès from Bonnefoy, or Follain from Frénaud. What is presented is less, in truth, a poetry about place than the fundamental celebration of poetry as place, as a centring in space and time, and an ever-unfinished actualization, of finite being's incalculable potential, manifested through felicitous encounters and supple oscillations between prosody and prose, now contracted in a form that is haiku-like, now magisterially extended in verse reminiscent of the classical ode or hymn. The locus amoenus of old, still very much present in the romantic tradition, has been stripped of the rhetorical flourishes that largely defined it and, opening itself to the inevitability of loss, absence and death, is reformulated poetically as interminable quest and questioning soliciting a response in each one of us. While the author scrupulously reminds us of a larger backdrop for this conversion, extending from Rousseau through to Thoreau and Proust (and this study is admirably complemented by Steven Winspur's La Poésie du lieu: Segalen, Thoreau, Guillevic, Ponge, published in the same year), it is somewhat regrettable that emphasis placed on the broader canvas is contradicted in part by the absence of any woman poet in these chapters: Marie-Claire Bancquart alone figures in the bibliography and, beyond this token reference, one might very unwisely infer that place in poetry is primarily a male prerogative! Another matter of contention is the author's brief treatment of poetry emanating from former French colonies, considered, as in the case of Glissant and Césaire, too politically engaged to attain to the 'niveau plus philosophique et proprement poétique' (p. 180) of the selected metropolitan writers. Such a judgement hastily drives (and perpetuates) an ill-founded division between French and francophone poetry, oblivious, as in the case of the first omission, to the teeming riches of a vast body of work viscerally informed by the question under examination. This is not to detract from Dupouy's deftly interwoven analyses that refer the reader back to the primacy of the texts themselves, it is merely to highlight the margins of an institutionally legitimized corpus in whose 'minor' space poetry — and the poetry of place — remains, also, very much alive.