José-Flore Tappy

Pierre à feu

« frotter l'allumette de ma voix sans peur dans cette nuit sans repères afin d'entrevoir ne serait-ce qu'un instant le pourtour de l'ombre. »

The violence and clarity struck by «Pierre à feu» on the first reading lent the name to this collection published in 1995. The short and sober poems are divided into two chapters, «Le Chemin» and «Herbe et fumée,» which contrast and complete each other. The poems are also often arranged around a metaphor that acts as an opposing force to the density of the verse, blowing the poems apart. In the poems, Tappy places her own life in the pull of this relation between centrifugal and centripetal movements:
« Fidèle et fugitive
telle je suis je passe
quenouille tournée par les vents
dans les fils innombrables du temps »

(Loyal and fugitive
as I am I move,
a spindle turned by the wind
in the innumerable threads of time)

In an elementary, inhuman world, respite from the violence of which is only to be found in words, someone is walking, fighting and loving, and trying to create enough light not to get lost forever, to resist the impetuous torrent of it all.

Although Tappy’s poetry is unsettling, itinerant and full of pain, she infuses her words with a salutary energy, a desire for love and beauty that does not seek to dodge the struggle and peculiarity of the human condition. Reading «Pierre à feu» has an invigorating effect on the consciousness and sharpens the senses.
(Françoise Delorme, transl. by Andrea Mason Willfratt)

Translation of title: Flint

Editions Empreintes, Lausanne 1987