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Reviewed by:
  • Delft Blue and Objects of the World: Archives I and II by Louise Warren
  • Adina Balint-Babos
Warren, Louise. Delft Blue and Objects of the World: Archives I and II. Guernica Editions, Incorporated, 2013. Pp 240. ISBN: 9781550717990. $20 (Paper).

If some people spend their lives terrified of being lonely, why do they not attempt to shift the loneliness into a form of art? This question seems to cross the book Delft Blue & Objects of the World by Louise Warren: its most interesting subject matter could be identified as a study in loneliness as art.

Delft Blue & Objects of the World, translated from French by Karen McPherson, features two parts: “Delft Blue: Archives of Solitude” and “Objects of the World. Archives of the Living,” which draw the reader’s attention to the materiality of words and objects that are likely to inspire the poet and the artist. Warren’s fragmentary digressions sometimes read as art criticism, sometimes as travel writing, sometimes they are poems or short meditations or snippets of memoir, yet all characterized by what she herself has referred to as “active contemplations” (5). Delft Blue is structured as an abécédaire, an alphabet book with one hundred and twenty-six entries arranged alphabetically in what we might call a “book of words” (9): from “apricot” to “voice”. The second part, Objects of the World, contains ten longer essays, each trying to capture thoughts, feelings, impressions, doubts and ambiguities on the creative process.

Warren’s meditations on art–and more generally on artistic creation (poetry and painting)–share with the philosophical digression an impulse to spare us from loneliness by stimulating certain intriguing ideas: for instance, to remember that “[t]o look at a tree is to let oneself be guided toward the inside, to welcome the other breathing, the breathing of writing, of forgetting,” or to define a woman in love as “[n]othing fixed. Just endless, endless path to open.” Short and dense is also a fair characterization of the fragments in this book, insofar as Louise Warren reveals her personal experiences as a poet and places them in dialogue with the artistic practices of other artists or writers (Alexandre Hollan and Anne Hébert, for example). “For me poetry is associated with the work of archives. The opposite of a symbolic writing where everything is camouflaged. To unbury” (2), she states. Indeed, although the fragments feature recollections on rather abstract notions such as “Delft Blue”, “Dream”, “Soul”, “Beginning”, Warren’s reflections are often doubled by realistic accounts: “I have this other very faraway image of myself, seated in the living-room, in a very soft, low armchair facing a glass-fronted bookcase” (54). These entries have a kinship with brief essays in an artistic encyclopedia, and in this sense, they allow us to reflect on “the objects of the world” as archives.

If she has published more that twenty-five books, including sixteen books of poetry, fourteen artists books, one anthology, two narratives and a book for [End Page 110] young readers, among these the collection Anthologie du present, the English translation of the texts in Delft Blue & Archives of the World, the first translation of a complete book by Warren, invites us once again to consider what place art occupies in our life. In poetry and essays alike, Warren engages us to seek out stories that lead us to better understand what it means to be an artist today and to carve a place in the world through a creative process. [End Page 111]

Adina Balint-Babos
University of Winnipeg
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