Liquid Amber Press (2024)
Reviewed by Jane Frank, StylusLit.
Dominque Hecq’s 16th poetry collection is, in equal parts, a linguistically sumptuous feast and an intellectually challenging enigma. The 69 prose poems are delivered without sections —“only kinetic and kaleidoscopic gestures” (77) — and I found myself needing to take large mental gulps of air between each of the taut, subversive fragments that jump across extraliterary terrains like philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, art and pop culture.
Hecq, whose previous creative work includes a novel, six collections of short stories and an expansive body of poetry, is a recipient of awards and honours including the Martha Richardson Medal for Poetry, the James Tate Poetry Prize, the Melbourne Festival Fringe Award for Outstanding Writing and Spoken Word Performance, the New England Review Prize for Poetry and the International Best Poets Prize in conjunction with the International Academy of Arts and Letters.
The collection’s title, Volte Face, meaning an act of complete turning or reversal, is central to Hecq’s intent: each of the poems in some way aims to deliver “a moment of truth … acknowledgement of the other … and the assertion of self” (77) which the poet achieves through an interchange of free-associative ideas sandwiched playfully among intellectual snippets and ekphrasis within the structural frame of the prose poem where, free from narrative concerns, sentences take on lives of their own. Some poems originate from Hecq’s earlier chapbook Endgame with No Ending (SurVision Books, 2023).
Hecq’s poems embrace a Surrealist mindset and move beyond literal meanings to explore a wide range of concerns and ideas —anxiety about the future, memory, the masks we wear, death, marriage, time—and as I read, I felt language itself was being used as a mysterious force of defamiliarisation. Through remarkable fugues, trips to unexpected places and surprising juxtapositions, the reader is able to make unforeseen connections and come to new understandings.
Reading this collection is like being let loose in a surrealist playground where everywhere you look, there are worlds within worlds:
A procession of words legible as the horizon would be at
a withheld point, withheld time: a washed out itinerary
inside a seagull’s gullet.
[‘Travelogue Dalí’ 5]
I particularly enjoyed the poem ‘Travelogue Dalí’ [5] which is suffused with clever lists that celebrate the materiality of language and the possibilities of linguistic textures:
… you are now a mere pinprick principle
vying with toxins, paperclips, peanuts, cigarette buts, skeins
of silk, stirrups, socks, glyphs, icicles, exoskeletons, nails
cuneiforms, marbles and jellyfish. You grit your teeth …
This brilliant poem of lists concludes with a fusing of dream and reality, an abstract merging of reason and irrationality that leaves a frisson of fear in the reader’s mind:
… ‘Tis done. You autograph your script. Unrushed,
the millennial eagle soars in the pixelated dusk. God
hemorrhages. You recede into cerise smoke.
Another poem with Surrealist content, ‘Magritte’s Gravestone’ [32], collages imagery from the famous artist’s work ‘This is Not a Pipe’, also known as ‘The Treachery of Images,’ together with text-bites from American artist and art critic, Suzi Gablik’s, book Magritte (Thames & Hudson, 1970) to play with the idea of fluidity —
… the intimate and secret connections
between things, correspondences and analogies from Baudelaire
to Lautréamont to Breton to Magritte, who used to provoke …
shock by causing the encounter of unrelated objects.
This poem addresses the life of the written piece itself and is a call to action for the reader:
This sentence waits to migrate past the confines of the page.
It’s moonstruck. Watch its metamorphosis.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe: we are made of letters. Look how
they liquefy the inkpot.
These are poems of serious play charged with ludic syntactical shifts that seem to have aesthetic concerns at their heart. Play with language is a central preoccupation of the work and the result is one arresting image after another and an acoustic richness that made me want to hear the poems read out loud to maximise the oral effects of assonance, alliteration and chiming.
Poems have intriguing titles like ‘Twinklewinkalling’ [18] and ‘The Lords of Rats and Eke of Mice’ [9]. In ‘Twinklewinkalling,’ there are breathtaking spirals of language:
… How you feared falling off bridges. It was
vertigo and agoraphobia took your breath away. No angel
wings here, though they say they are always blue. How
many times can you die? I zero in on the white hole of the
question mark. No breath. Your throat, cinerous grey, is
lined with needles. A thimbleful of bluish light. A chrysalis.
This auditory quality is enhanced even further by the cinematic cuts between ideas that make the reader feel like they are watching a Surrealist film. There are continual paratactic shocks as we read the text, the poet insisting that the reader remain vigilant as they experience the work.
In ‘Breathless’ [73], a poem after Jean-Luc Goddard, French-Swiss film director and screenwriter, the reader finds themselves in the midst of the film’s action and a stream of consciousness. ‘Breathless’:
… begins on a runway as thin as a Beckett plot with
cocky Michel puffing away if you don’t like the sea or
the mountains or the big city go fuck yourself. A gawk in
the rear vision mirror. Jibe at the camera. La la la … A gun.
Pan! The cop is dead. Who cares? Cocky wants to bolt to
Rome with cool Patricia … We are dead men on leave.
There are a plethora of intertextual references in this collection which are intricately woven—many to Surrealist writers, artists and thinkers—but poems also refer to, or cite, other poets and writers such as Kenneth Slessor [‘Five Bells’, 11], S T Coleridge’s Kubla Khan [‘The Entombment,’ 6], Joan Lindsay’s Hanging Rock [‘Whimsical’ 26], Rimbaud’s ‘Ophélie’ [‘Prosopagnosia,’ 57], Margaret Atwood’s ‘Fear of Birds’ from Dearly (2020) in a poem of the same name and Georges Louis Borges [‘Borges and I’, 1]. There are also music and pop culture references to Pink Floyd [‘Bricks,’ 25] Oasis’ famous ‘Champagne Supernova’ [Champagne Supernova, Taché,’ 24] and The Doors’ album Strange Days [‘The Doors,’ 75].
I love the electric shock of these poems, their edginess, the startling beautiful language used and the wide-ranging subject matter. I recommend this collection to you whether you have a particular interest in Surrealism or if you want to read sharp, deeply felt, experimental poems that will linger in your mind long after you close the book.