Blandine Longre
traduction littéraire
poetry
Cosmographia
& other poems
with an introduction by Paul Stubbs
Black Herald Press, 2015
70 pages – 9 €
ISBN 978-2-919582-10-5
These poems are ploughing new territories outside of the compulsion to portray any particular emotion or feeling, for what each of them demands of itself is not just ‘expression’ or an escape from expression, but to uproot the very trunk of the language which has already outgrown such things. Blandine Longre, in carving away at the object of the idol of her own primordial will, draws blood fresh from the fingertips of any reader who might happen to pick up and inspect the rough-hewn contours of her truest self—that is from the detritus of each imaginary torso-in-the-making that may float inside of our brains soon after reading her: ‘senses maddened into bone-tales distold: / fronting the words of thick-wet / their loose skeleton only savant mimicry’. (Paul Stubbs)
https://www.blackheraldpress.com/cosmographia
Me-fig
https://www.blackheraldpress.com/post/me-fig---blandine-longre
Clarities
Black Herald Press, 2010
120×160 – 48 pages – 8 euros
ISBN 978-2-919582-00-6
Longre’s poetry, if it was allowed entry, would be a French fox with Anglo-Saxon teeth, let loose in an English henhouse. Confusion and panic must ensue when lines like ‘Alien to its own words (meaning-gouged, spewed out, led astray) / a gorgoned mouth turns its clammy / stares beyond my charred eyeballs, / at the flying dampness of / those medean tears of mine.’ peer hungrily around the door. But the power here is not so much in the horror soaked central section which almost shreds itself to vacancy in the combines of inner rage, but in the indefinable beauty of the last line ‘at the flying dampness of / those medean tears of mine’ which seems to soften and slow like a brake in its alliteration and rhythm the harsh imagery that precedes it. There is something lurking within this seemingly brazen poetry, which is tender and precious, like an injured bird you kept in a cardboard box that you hide from others and desperately hope will not die.
Will Stone, Agenda Vol 46 No 3 (April 2012)
Un article de Sabine Huynh (sur le site Terres de femmes)
https://terresdefemmes.blogs.com/mon_weblog/2015/03/blandine-longre-clarities-par-sabine-huynh.html
Autres articles (en anglais)
https://www.blackheraldpress.com/clarities