MARIE-CHRISTINE BRIÈRE : WUTHERING HEIGHTS

An anthology around Cordes, surrealism and feminism

par Françoise Py

January 6, 2023

80 pages. With six original color photos by Ludwig Raynal taken in Cordes or its surroundings, two black and white photos from the author's archives, and the reproduction of a watercolor by her own hand.

This collection of poems — ranging from 1965 to 2017 — chosen by Françoise Armengaud from the published works of Marie-Christine Brière (1941-2017) and from her archives owes its title to the family house of Wuthering Heights in Cordes. A beloved vacation home that had to be left. In a poem entitled "Do Not Sell the House," the poet wrote:

Farewell to the family home, the stars that risk their points on the puech stuffed with aluminum from where the crows in colonies escape from the plum trees. Put salt for the storytellers sprung from both banks [...] Put salt, we will have to cross the Darkness.

It is clear why Jean Breton once stated that the poetry of Marie-Christine Brière "is a mixture of autobiographical realism, baroque, and surrealism by the surging, disorienting, point-blank image." Let us also quote here a poem from the Romancero contraire, a posthumous publication in the work Du rouge à peine aux âmes, dedicated by Françoise Armengaud to the poetry of Marie-Christine Brière, in whom Christophe Dauphin detects a remarkable gift for observing the signs of reality, "which the poetess knows how to elevate to the Marvelous, in the magic of ordinary happy days." Thus, in one of the most beautiful stanzas of this very long poem Romancero contraire:

Sometimes it was five o'clock, the five fingers of the royal hand of the Occitan noon the five castles of light in sandals touching is like saying saying is touching with five fingers and speaking discovers, undoes modesty infuses desire, has the taste of the spiritual body.