The Clarity of Voices: Selected Poems: 1974-1981

Julie Rekai Rickerd is a Toronto broadcaster and public relations
consultant.

Montreal-born Philippe Haeck is a poet and essayist. One of the founders of the magazine Chroniques, he was also a literary critic for Le Devoir: The Clarity of Voices (Selected Poems: 1974-1981), a collection of his prose poems, represents a serious re-evaluation of Quebec and the Quebecois personally, socially, politically, and artistically.

Haeck’s belief that all his works, to date, belong to a single entity and take their special place in his complete works and in the complete works of his nation, Quebec, leaves little room for humour on levity in his work. He attempts “to reconcile the personal world and the artistic universe... also the nation he belongs to.” He searches for solutions to “the problems of personal and political identity.” He addresses “flashes of an upcoming spiritual crisis.”

Haeck claims to have broken away from the “Quebecois literary tradition.” By 1975 he was writing “legible, extremely personal [poetry] resembling the diary entry, the essay.” His poems do seek a clarity of voice. He indulges in metaphysical and erotic imagery to bring home a desperate need, as he sees it, for a new order, a new society, a new moral existence. The poet himself wants to fashion and dictate the new order. He wants to re-write emotion, need, style and necessity. He wants a new world according to Haeck in which an erotic woman might easily represent the letters of the alphabet.

Poet Antonio D’Alfonso’s translation retains Haeck’s ponderous view of Utopia. His style is self-centred and inward-looking. Haeck associates creativity with philosophy, not the “cultural stardom” he attributes to many of his colleagues. He shuns “a maiming job and computerized pastimes” which “leave no time to imagine a better way of life.” Through his “quest for the naked word,” Haeck has not only broken away from the traditional, he seems to have left reality and responsibility behind.