4722 Rue Berri

Ellen Pilon is a library assistant in the Patrick Power Library at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax.

Mona Fertig founded The Literary Storefront in Vancouver, a literary centre fashioned after Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. in Paris in the 1930s. After living the Storefront for four years, she moved to Montreal in 1982 to live with her sister while her love travelled the other way to Australia. 4722 Rue Bern is a record of her Montreal summer.

Subtitled “A poetic journal (with dreams, drawings and poems),” the volume consists chiefly of journal entries. Although specifically Mona Fertig’s own experiences — her writing, her ache for her lover, her foray into bilingualism, her club hopping — the personal transcends itself into a universal as we the readers share her story. During the reading it becomes our story too. Juxtaposing journal entries with carefully placed and brief dream sequences, a few poems, a couple of prose poems, photographs of the place, drawings, and even calendar pages, Fertig presents a whole which catches the reader.

Mona Fertig’s talent with words also contributes to the reader’s absorption. She works her words easily and naturally, including images, symbols, and archetypes, with consummate skill. Despite its inclusion of so many different forms, the book is never cut-and-paste. The poems achieve even greater meaning set in the context of the journal.

4722 Rue Berri is a gold mine of information about the year 1982: Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, war in the Falkland Islands. It is also a portrait of a growing artist and of a modern bohemian lifestyle.