Quelques extraits d'articles parus ici et là / Extracts from a few reviews.
Clarities, Blandine Longre
Black Herald Press, September 2010
120×160 – 48 pages – 8 euros
ISBN 978-2-919582-00-6
Order the book / Commander l’ouvrage
“In Clarities we see one of these voices, speaking to the fluid richness of a previously unexplored liquid centre. Clarities gives one the experience of the timelessness of existence. There is no pinning life down, pinning me down. I am invited to be read by Longre. She sees me and she expresses my own fleeting crucial moments in her exploration of my engaging with life. Rather than expose, dictate, alleviate, Longre reveals. She uncovers those moments that are the universe on the point of the pin; she turns them on me, and lets me feel the pierce of their enormity. I have an experience of borderless-ness. I can’t tell where she starts and I begin. There is no pre amble. No introduction. She siren-sits and when I get there, I discover a shared humanity in her words that is as intimate as it is universal.” (…)
Longre seems infinitely aware of the swirling fluidity of each human, separate and together with all that exists. The perpetual swim against the tide of annihilation, useless and exhausting, and yet imbued with the necessary meaning that leads to a knowing that is not like a grasp but more like a smoky awareness of my own existence, rests behind all these beautiful poems, like a rain of water stars. Despite the introduction to my darker self, there is hope. There is a body. There is a tangendental version of real. Longre lets me feel my self with my fingertips. She never preaches at me, but lets me feel my own seeping fluid in amongst the tangled conglomerate of my own version of self hood."
Lisa Thatcher (April 2011)
“What Clarities introduces us to is a poet absolutely fully formed, dealing with the subtleties of human communication in a pressured, psychologically intriguing way. There is also much of the ecstatic in the tone of this poet, a voice that closely adheres to its own joy, in the sense of, say, a Whitman or a Blake. (…)
Formally we have something akin to Elizabethan sonnets blown to smithereens and re-arranged by a combination of an Apollinaire, a William Carlos Williams and a Charles Olson. Longre’s lines slither and slurp across the page, others speed and jump proto-iambically… (…)
…the form creates its own sonic imperatives and bustles along its way in mixtures of half-rhyme, no-rhyme, vowel echoes, assonances and airs. Again, what impresses is the directness that is maintained despite the wordly acrobatics, the intention still present in each thrust and burst of language. From an English language perspective Longre seems to have conjured a poetics and poetry that is consistently joyful, satisfying and intelligent.”
Andrew O’Donnell in The Fiend (March 2011)
“Blandine Longre is not just a metaphysical poet, she is rather a poet who, by a monstrous yet involuntary excavation of the soul/self, emerges as an archeologist of the most secret and unimaginable depths of ‘being’. A poet who has rightly denied herself the expedient pleasure of flicking through the quasi-scientific ‘rulebooks’ of poetry, excommunicating herself rather from the unsparing propulsion even of her own syntax. She takes the end of each line as if a loose and still-sparking electricity cable and connects us to a new imaginative forcefield of language. (...)
“She arrives at the nerve-terminals of experience before we have registered it. Language is experiencing her, not the other way round. She possesses the necessary imaginative fatalism that separates the very good poet from the utterly unique one. The metabolism created anew by her own etymological non-reason has the overwhelming effect of forcing us to climb free suddenly from the darkness of a literary grave. We find ourselves arriving too late, such are the rapid associations and proddings of her mind, we have no other choice but to accept her logic, accept it as our new poetical fate, and the violent and cataclysmic ruptures of her poems as the inevitable moving away from the piteous and weak contemporary idioms that we cannot help but wage a war against. “
Paul Stubbs (March 2011)
“Love’s not so pure and abstract as they used to say”
"The uniqueness that is Blandine Longre’s in this collection of poems is twofold, in my opinion. Firstly, she has identified a domain: the powerful complexity of instincts and vicissitudes, and their processes and their drives. Secondly, she has found a language and a form for their expression. It involves neologism, courageous experiment and a fierce intelligence to have kept such a sustained control. There is an immanence of the object in her writing which is entirely compelling.
Blandine Longre invites us to share an intensity of seeing, comprehending, reading the other and beyond: responding to the judgment call and interpreting the momentous subtlety of the moment. She has constituted an art of the matter of seeing: seeing in a most intimate and shockingly dynamic way. The irreducible integrity of the image that Pound once envisaged is herein extant. Clarities is an astonishing debut. Blandine Longre has unleashed a new, vital, metaphysical animal upon an unsuspecting public. Be warned!"
Nigel Parke (November 2010)
"The usual point of reference for this sort of corporeal (and feminised) writing would be Plath, especially since she is quoted in the introduction. But the effect, especially above, is more reminiscent of Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations’, This is interesting, because English is a second language for Longre, yet clearly the poems were (well) written in our great language – sorry for that vulgarity. (...)
There’s an Ashbery quote, about French being too clear and logical a language for some of the nuanced tonal effects achievable in English. Yet look at what Celine, Genet or Artaud achieved, poetically. Indeed, look at the best poems in this collection. Although written in English, they have the unmistakable clarity and relentless logic of the best French writing."
Paul Sutton (Stride magazine, October 2010)
The Wolf, The magazine for new poetry, issue 24 – mars 2011