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Synopsis
Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin International Prize, the world's largest poetry prize. Cold Spring in Winter (Pas Revoir in its original French) caused quite a stir when it was published in 1999. Here was the shock of an authentically new voice in whose urgent, stammered cadences an adult, and the little girl she used to be, join together to compose a lament for her dead father, a scrap-metal dealer. It takes a page or two to get used to this strange mixture of ‘child-speak’, youth slang, made-up words, puns and sophisticated adult expression (all perfectly conveyed in Susan Wick’s translation), but once immersed in this extraordinary sequence of poems, it is hard to put it down, so compelling, strange and moving does it prove to be. Arc Visible Poets’ series no. 25 "... this poet has found a truly authentic voice in what will doubtlessly be a glittering career this side of the Channel." Poetry Review
Cold Spring in Winter is French poet Valerie Rouzeau's debut collection. It came out in France in 2003. It's a lament for the death of her father, who ran a scrap yard: a pertinent fact as it is simply quite dazzling to witness how Rouzeau mimics his job of picking through scraps of glass, metal and paper with her own delving into language's backyard of puns, inversions, slangy neologisms and fragments of songs and sayings...Through linguistic and semantic games of hide-and-seek with her childhood self, Rouzeau chases memories other father with the urgency of her fear that they might become unremembered. To achieve and sustain this effect of 'babble and squeak', Rouzeau has edited in rather than out the baby-talk of elision, pot-luck 'gerundation' and meaning driven by sound and speech patterns that children tend to pick up on intuitively... The French lyrical tradition of Rimbaud and Baudelaire has been in the freezer since WW1 (for decades now to write a lyrical poem is to commit a faux pas in most literary circles in France), in favour of experimentalism and word games. Wicks has understood this and, give or take a couple of safe bets, she has resisted the temptation to cover any quirkiness with a lyrical muffler and has quite brilliantly saved a poetic technique from being lost in translation. As Wicks says in her translator's preface, she took a gamble and it paid off. As for Rouzeau, this poet has found a truly authentic voice in what will doubtlessly be a glittering career this side of the Channel.
Astrid van Baalen
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