Mathilde Vischer's narrative poetry

Dear reader,

I’m speaking to you. You, the most important link in the book’s chain. One might call you the golden link, the essential link, the link that cannot be removed without breaking the whole. You, reader, without whom the book would have no reality, as a Slovak writer named Pavel Vilikovsky once said. I’d like to tell you that amid the rush of new releases for the fall literary season—which is increasingly like the surging waves of a magnificent tsunami—I’d like to tell you that you don’t have to get soaked up to your neck. In other words, you can stay dry, dare to take your time, and read peacefully in the shade of a tree—why not poetry, for example? It’s true—why not stand out this year by straying from the norm, instead of following trends, by reading Like a star falls in the night, by Mathilde Vischer?

It’s actually not one of those books from this flood of new releases; it’s not a new title, but you know, it’s a book that’s less than a year old and still has that fresh, new feel to it. It’s brimming with youth. Of course, when it comes to this literary season, I’m sure you’ve already figured it out. It’s not about doing things differently just for the sake of it. Nor is it about sabotaging it, or worse yet, ignoring it and then forgetting it—but simply about creating your own literary season on demand, when you feel that deep, inner, bubbling desire to do so. To approach your literary season more freely, a bit like playing hooky—that’s what I want to tell you. Because playing hooky—isn’t that leaving school for the pleasure of returning?

If I take an unfiltered approach here Like a star falls in the night (I have to warn you), this is already to share a resonance with you. To describe the resonance of the words in crude terms would be a lie. Rather, it’s the resonance created when the words come together, rubbed against one another, like rubbing wood against wood to make it heat up and smoke, in the hope of starting a fire. In this collection, it’s that resonance that really catches the eye and the ear. The lyrical, magnetic, and meticulous writing draws us into the text, and each short paragraph carries its own meaning. It’s like a series of images to look at.

All this forms stories. There are also characters caught up in these stories. You'll tell me that stories, or the telling of stories, is strictly the business of the novel, that it's the ordinary marathon of serialists, novelists and prose writers, but that's not true. What's special about Mathilde Vischer's poetry is that it's poetic prose. There's a narrative, and the characters are called Jeiran or Myriam, for example. Who says reading is a solitary act? And you know, characters inevitably mean childhood or old age, birth or death, love or lovelessness, appearance or disappearance, hands touching and hands leaving, as is the case with the following disappearance:

«One night they lie side by side in a bare room. He covers her hands, then clasps them lightly in his. He envelops them, like the garment of a benevolent, consoling skin. They lie side by side like two dead men exchanging hands, burying one another, in the desire for a light, comparable, unique disappearance.»

As you may have guessed, this narrative, or rather these narratives, are not linear. There are no steps to follow. You're not following a marked path. Of course, there are texts that follow one another, but each text is an entity in its own right, sometimes continuing the previous text, sometimes openly breaking it off, to assert its independence. It's because the stories don't follow one another that the charm works.

In short, it's a bit like remembering. You remember a multitude of details of a story, facts and gestures that clash and intersect, but you can't remember them linearly. We remember them according to the powder keg of memory. The poetess, if it's really her, if she hasn't disguised herself while writing, or better still, if she hasn't absented herself, remembers in the shade of a chestnut tree a child eating ice cream. And on the page that follows the memory of this child, there is death and the cemetery as the only answer to life. Isn't this the poet's way of talking about everything, and approaching pleasure by tackling pain?

In the background, read Like a star falling in the night, is to enter fully into short stories, without taking off your shoes. Some are punctuated by questions, dreams and reminders. Time is just a watch to be wound according to the lucidity of the moment:

«I've opted for clear-sightedness. Gentleness and lucidity. But these words, these images assail me. To give birth to a child here, under the rubble of meaning, in a society that is capsizing. I see her, look at her, her children clinging to her, she's frail and aging, she's crying, they hang from her long silk skirt with holes in it, begging for attention, imploring. We stand with our arms at her sides, incredulous, slowly prisoners of her motionless suffering, the darkness of her hands gradually permeating the interior of our thoughts.»

The images rain down, and as a reader, you follow in their footsteps. Where to? I'd be tempted to say where the stars fall at night, but that's another matter. To go with whom? I'd be tempted to say with the characters in the collection, but that's not all. To do what? I'd be tempted to say I don't know a damn thing. What's important, in the end, when you read Like a star falls in the night in the shade of a tree, how to put it, is perhaps to have no intention and «not to try to catch the other in his own dream, to leave him free, in the enigma of his strength and misery».

Write to the author: [email protected]

Photo credit: © Maxisciences

Mathilde Vischer
Like a star falls in the night
Editions Samizdat
2019
116 pages

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