Nuage Editions, 1999
ISBN: 0921833679
96 PAGES
* Shortlisted for the A.M. Klein / QWF Poetry Award *
ABOUT THE BOOK
On October 10, 1970, Quebec's Minister of Labour, Pierre Laporte, was kidnapped outside of his Saint-Lambert home by the Chenier Cell of a terrorist group known as the FLQ. One week later, he was found dead in the trunk of a car.
October is a collection of poetry set in the quiet Montreal suburb of Saint Lambert, where the clash between the "two solitudes" came to a head in 1970 with the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Pierre Laporte by the FLQ. For the narrator, growing up in those days meant living through one of the darkest episodes in Canadian history—a time when army tanks, bombings and other random acts of violence became l'ordre du jour.
October spans three decades of Quebec life, chronicling one woman's attempt to forge some kind of reconciliation between the "warring" cultures, to find the common ground of the French and the English. It is a personal, unabashed look at her own marriage to a French Quebecer which finds her straddling two worlds, two cultures, two very different mentalities. From start to end, echoes of the October Crisis are carefully woven into the text, a constant reminder that the fractious past is never very far behind.
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COMMENTARY / REVIEWS
"Not often are the divisions that beset and define our country played out in the work of a single poet. Carolyn Marie Souaid is a brave exception. Her tender, hurting poems show what can happen when family politics incarnate so much love, so much heartfelt pain." —Mark Abley
"Those who remember the stylish introspection and hushed elegance of Montrealer Carolyn Marie Souaid's debut, Swimming into the Light, will be surprised by her second collection, October. The memory of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte's murder (he was killed on October 10, 1970, by the FLQ) has darkened Souaid's voice far beyond its earlier, and quieter, elegiac stance. Many of these new poems possess the urgency of dispatches and are the more powerful for it... —The Montreal Gazette
EXCERPTS
LAST THOUGHTS OF PIERRE LAPORTE, STUFFED AND LEFT IN A CAR TRUNK AT SAINT-HUBERT AIRBASE
Their jackal eyes, their cool
upturned collars
the holy chain on my neck, my wife, my kids
my lamp-lit bungalow
downtown drunks and their pointless lives
like beads of a broken rosary
pinging across the floor
Domtar men with heart conditions, midnight jobs
stirring soupy vats of paper
forebears on the stony land
ragged, broken men
livestock bred into madness
the world tipped on its side
unstoppable, the whirring
in my brain
the suffocating darkness
just wanting a pillow
and a last grab of air.
*
A COUNTRY / UN PAYS
These things I can't explain: why your eyes cloud over
when Vigneault comes on the radio singing
Il me reste un pays à semer
and why when we hold each other, closer than breath,
it feels we're a time zone apart. After you left
for work, I ran my hand through your wardrobe of shirts,
their collars and sleeves emptied
of your smell.
The first snow of the season
made you wistful, its haunted breath
whispering after you, shadowing you
like a ghost.
You are alone on the couch
listening to your songs; I'm by the small, practical light
of the stove reading your blue dictionary.
"Country: Région, contrée, ville
où l'on est né, patrie. Avant que d'être à vous
je suis à mon pays."
