Le soliel sous la mort.

Roy, G. Ross

Fernand Ouellette holds an honored place in Canadian letters: poet, novelist, essayist, and editor, he has also held positions with Radio Canada and the National Film Board of Canada. He has received his country's highest literary award, the Governor General's Prize, twice: once for fiction and once for poetry. His first volume of poetry was published in 1955, and the present collection contains poems going back to 1958. A bilingual edition of his verse, Wells of Light, was issued in 1989.

The breadth of Ouellette's experience is reflected in his writing, as we see in Le soleil sous la mort. The importance of his family is gauged by the presence of a poem dedicated to each of his three children. In "Oxygene" he calls on Sylvie to leap as does a feather (or a pen?) before being drawn into the sun. But Ouellette is also the poet of modern technology, as we see in the title of one work, "Radiographies du jour," where science, humanity, and nature blend: "Mefiez-vous des ultrasons de l'arbre, et de l'ultraparfum du metal dans la nuit de serre:/.../Sur des berceuses d'atomes, l'enfant console ses fees blondes .../.../Il n'y a plus que poissons de cuir, cargaisons de filles ... et vaste chimie."

Occasionally, science appears to have been stood on its head. In "Hors du soleil" the North, an ever-present image in Canadian literature and art, is almost made one with the warmth of a woman and the sun: "Et le Nord apaise sa violence vive./La chaleur glisse lente/comme une femme glisse/hors du soleil." Intermingled with technical imagery we find that human passion also plays an important role in the poet's work, as in "Passeport des etoiles": "Ta pure extase est passeport des etoiles./Quand dans ton corps les forets courent et les ilots de muguet,/Aucune piqure de mort, ni l'audace tene-breuse de l'homme/ne sonderont la clairiere de ton ange."

World traveler and searcher into the vastness of space, Ouellette can also be very much the hometown author. In a poem dedicated to Edgard Varese the first section ends with the naming of the principal street and the largest newspaper of Ouellette's Montreal.

The short section "Naissance de la paix," significantly dedicated to his parents (as procreators?), is at once Christian and erotic: "La terre ne sait qu'une chair,/la fragile, la douloureuse,/la terre contracte le Verbe/comme un fils de femme." Here Ouellette plays with the biblical Verb (in French, the Gospel According to Saint John begins, "Au commencement etait le Verbe ... "), and he carries the creative idea of "to be" forward in the poem, linking it with Mary, the mother of God: "Sur Marie s'appuie le silence,/le grand silence/avant le gemissement de l'Etre." The poem and the book end with Peace opening her eyes and staring at, even outstaring, Death.

There are a number of satisfying and thought-provoking poems in this small collection.

G. Ross Roy University of South Carolina