If you’ve spent any time in Québec feminist writing, lesbian writing or avant-garde writing, you’ve run into Nicole Brossard. If you’ve spent time in all three, you’ve probably noticed she’s the only person standing in the middle of the Venn diagram.
That’s more or less what poet Sina Queyras means when she calls Brossard “a wholly singular writer,” in a blurb quoted on the /books entry. Brossard has published more than thirty books since 1965. She has won two Governor General’s Awards for poetry, the Canada Council’s Molson Prize and the Prix Athanase-David, and she is a Chevalière de l’Ordre national du Québec. She still lives in Montreal, the city that runs through so much of her work.
Ardour, published in English by Coach House Books in 2015, arrived roughly fifty years after her first book. That timing matters. This isn’t a young poet trying to make a name. It’s a poet who has spent half a century pushing at the edges of what a poem can do, writing about the things that still hold her attention.
According to the publisher, those things are intimacy and connection. The poems in Ardour look at how silence, the quiet inside a person, can still be a kind of communication, even when the world outside feels unstable. The publisher describes the tenderness in these poems as a form of astonishment. That’s a lovely idea, and a very Brossard one. After fifty years, she is still astonished by closeness.
For readers new to her, a little context helps. Brossard came up in the 1970s as one of the central figures of Québec’s feminist literary movement. She co-founded the literary magazine La Barre du jour and later helped found the feminist newspaper Les Têtes de pioche. Her lesbian writing was never coded or apologetic. Books like Picture Theory and The Aerial Letter treated lesbian desire as a way of rethinking language itself, which is a big claim, and she spent decades backing it up.
That history is why Ardour is a good entry point. It’s short, at 106 pages, and it’s late work, so it carries the confidence of everything that came before without asking you to have read all of it. You can come to it cold.
A word of warning for readers who like their poetry plain-spoken: Brossard isn’t. Her lines can be elliptical, and her syntax does unexpected things, even in translation. If you go in expecting Mary Oliver, you’ll be confused. If you go in expecting to slow down and let the language work on you, you’ll probably have a much better time.
This is for readers curious about Canadian and Québécois lesbian literature, poets who want to see what fifty years of experiment looks like when it settles, and anyone who has felt that the quietest moments with a lover say the most.
If you want a second Brossard, the bibliography also has Notebook of Roses and Civilization, an earlier collection with a very different texture.
Over to you. Have you read Brossard in French, in English or not at all yet? Do you prefer poetry that explains itself, or poetry that makes you work? And is silence between two people intimacy or avoidance? Brossard seems to think it can be both.
Details are on the Ardour entry in the Lesbian Bibliography.