Pellucid Waters

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

Pellucid Waters is a collection of poems taken from six volumes
published in the 1960s by the Québécois poet and enfant terrible
Claude Péloquin. Born in 1942, Péloquin was a young man during the
years of the Quiet Revolution. It was a young voice, then, that dared to
say, “It’s a burden to awaken / to worlds with sinking horizons.”
Here and elsewhere, Péloquin seems more interested in the fate of the
individual than in politics.

In his prose texts, some of which could be called prose poems,
Péloquin advocates a “continuous co-existence with risk, even
temerity.” He attacks “all forms of anonymity,” including
timidity, intellectualism, neutrality, and modesty. For Péloquin, only
the artist can reveal what is “POSSIBLE in the IMPOSSIBLE.” “Shame
on you,” he declares, “men of little faith in poems!”