Writing as dying: The tomb of words (Poetry, themes, mourning)

The poetry of Denise Desautels highlights the work of mourning: mourning fo r family figures, objects of beauty, even language itself as a place of mel ancholy. From one book to the next is created a vast poetic "tomb" sustaine d by obsessive motifs such as death and words, ruins and tears, rooms and g raveyards. Various rhetorical and stylistic markers support this thematic p rogramme. Ritualistic incantation, theatricalization of affects, specular m ultiplication and verbal expenditure, repetitive textual symmetries, mnemon ic reduplication and and stories within stories are all techniques of lingu istic volubility and pathetic saturation attempting to exorcise the drama o f loss, at the level of "forms of expression," through lyrical flow and utt erance. Anchored both in chronology and in the contrapuntal system of echoe s reverberating from one book to the next, the polysemic reading suggested here by Paul Chanel Malenfant is one in which the manufacture of the poem i s literally governed by the work of mourning.