Translation: Excerpts from "Forest of Clues" by Véronique Cyr
Poems translated from the French by Andrea Moorhead
Véronique Cyr: A Collective and Collaborative Journey
(a note from the translator)
What could be more universal than first love? How can we retrace intimate events that left their mark on us without looking for signs or clues that we did not recognize as the relationship developed? Véronique Cyr's poetry is resolutely feminist; her work explores the labyrinthine layers of human relationships and the tensions generated as a woman explores and expresses the authenticity and validity of her personal reality.
She offers the reader a collective and collaborative journey into human intimacy and responsibility through the eyes of a young woman in love, tormented by her lover's betrayal and toxic self-doubt. In Forest of Clues Véronique Cyr seeks a dynamic center for events that she lived or could have lived and for the now blurred images associated with these events. Her language is carefully crafted, with no trace of artificial lyricism. She creates an intricate puzzle of visceral emotions, tentative encounters, and fragile memories. Her poems evoke the presence of Sting, Kurt Cobain's Nirvana, and MC Solaar in the very heart of the intimate monologues of a jilted lover. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda deeply affected her and becomes one of the dominant motifs of the Forest of Clues.
Born in Montréal in 1978, Cyr received an MFA in creative writing from l’UQAM. In March 2016, she participated in a reading tour of Québécois poets in Sweden and Denmark to celebrate a special issue of the Swedish journal Lyrikvännen dedicated to Québécois poetry. Later that year, she was the invited speaker at the Festival de la revue in Lyon, France. She served as literary director of the poetry journal Estuaire from 2014 to 2017.
Cyr has published four books of poems with les éditions Poètes de brousse : La Maison sans miroir (2006), La vie liquide (2008), Installation du feu (2010), and Force de traînée (2013), and, with Les Herbes rouges, Forêt d’indices (2017) and, most recently, La jeune fille des négatifs (2022), a poetic text that interweaves verse, prose, and letters.
Andrea Moorhead
You’re wearing funeral clothes stitched by the June rain several versions of you cast their reflections in a dreamlike logic yours or mine you’re carrying an embryo in your jacket pocket the noise of the sun runs along the conifers’ twisted horizon the first clue breaks down the roles supports fire and antelope by reverse fiction your pulse liberated
The second clue is an incurable form that grabs hold of us dread hunting games liberation desire is a bramble a bloody fissure there is nothing more for us here at last nothing more between us I unclench my jaw I breathe you approach I take ages to put my head back on my shoulders
I’m somewhere else I didn’t ask for anything adolescents are living in us they enter and leave all the time through a shadowy hole at the back of your throat I take your scratchy clammy hand I listen to the derisive wheezing of your lungs you drag me towards the track you’re hiding bloodless animals in your iron silence
You’re a formidable adversary our clothes our masks are ruined during the race concentration rage abandonment entire memories spring up near the puddles revive pain your interminable Europe six hundred nights dancing with Marissa to the hypnotic rhythm of MC Solaar
We leave the circular track cross the yard the garden the park I tell you about the book that I’m writing its emergency exits its lilacs a darkroom of poems you tell me about the book that you are writing failures bereavement scars clearings we know too much about each other I fall to my knees behind the bushes you undo my heart strings you open the heart-shaped box free the birds from the precipices
I resume the race despite my open chest I’m out of breath you gain on me we enter the second copse behind the hospital where my accomplice plays solitaire she just downed a guy who looks like you coming out of a motel I hesitate to grab the steak knife* that she me offers to finish you off I sit with her a moment she deals me twelve cards we continue the conversation women’s memory and patience
*Carole David, L’année de ma disparition
“The Little Mermaid” sisters track me whisper that I’ll find my voice again then offer me a Laguiole knife and iron courage I throw the knife into the fountain the iron courage into the dandelions an innervated floral silence follows my mother’s pink lilac reappears I ought to wake up right now
Two circles at the edge of the park form a polychrome fresco our former group of friends approaches us sweaty runners water guns and Southern Comfort I turn towards the other circle serious people gin and tonics in hand stomping on burned poems each one sinks a knife between the other’s shoulder blades scarlet rivulets on the ground
Memories’ room the scene of raptures I’m thirty surely older out of nowhere you appear at the bar the chameleon moves quickly I’m a Russian doll you target the miniature that still holds desire its dose concentrated and lethal my fingers relapse stain your forearm with ink when I leave in the morning a heavy crow on my shoulder pecks at crumbs in my hair
Kilometers of ice floes break off on my tongue ageless I run with and against you our childhoods infinitely superimposed it’s not a kiss these are two bodies might as well say the Occupation or prehistory or farther back before fire or water it’s the forest that’s going to spit me out again
Born in Montréal in 1978, Véronique Cyr received an MFA in creative writing from l’UQAM. She has published four books of poems with les éditions Poètes de brousse : La Maison sans miroir (2006), La vie liquide (2008), Installation du feu (2010), and Force de traînée (2013), and with Les Herbes rouges, Forêt d’indices (2017) and La jeune fille des négatifs (2022). Cyr was literary director of the poetry journal Estuaire from 2014 to 2017. She was awarded the Prix Félix-Antoine-Savard de Poésie in 2020.
