Julien Delmaire
- France -
Julien Delmaire, born in 1977. He writes poetry, novels and plays. He has been performing for more that twenty years, in France and abroad. Julien Delmaire organises numerous writing workshops in schools, in psychiatric hospitals, in prisons and in libraries. His novels are all published by Grasset : “Georgia” in 2013 (Prix de la Porte Dorée), “Frère des astres” in 2016 (Prix Spiritualités d’Aujourd’hui), “Minuit, Montmartre” in 2017. His next novel “Delta Blues” will be published in September 2021. Julien Delmaire has published seven collections of poetry, including: “Bogolan” in 2015 (Temps des Cerises) “Rose-Pirogue” in 2016 (Mémoire d’Encrier), “Turbulences” in 2018 (Temps des Cerises).When he's not traveling in search of inspiration, Julien lives and writes in Avignon.
In her review from March 2016 Alice Lefilleul writes: "
The last text of Julien Delmaire, “Rose-Pirogue”, is an acutely poetic book that mixes strong images, and where the poet’s interior worlds embrace reality eloquently.
Julien Delmaire writes as if he were standing on hot bricks. Torn between the earth and sky, he builds a realm of words and images where to “exile when the blues pulls one down”. The book is under the sign of rose, which is not, here, a plain color but, on the contrary, an explosive, sensible, intense one. Poetry is the tyrant that rules Rose-Pirogue, and the whole book seems to run through a common vein, an intense fight with verb.
Poetry can achieve everything, invent everything, and always goes back to humanity:
“Poetry taught me that I was a transversal lesbian, a metaphysical punk, a blind bluesman, a shy swinger and a propeller ascetic. And that, doubtlessly, we look alike.”
Language is a tool that shatters the patine of conventions, and those “horsehair glove-poems” reveal all the shades of a whole pallet of feelings: joy, desire, sadness, anguish, anger, indignation.
Rose-pirogue is to be found in this very place that everybody has inside, and that one often finds in Delmaire’s work. Here where interior anguishes lie and clash with the outside world, right under the skin. A kind of roar arises from this tension between intimacy and a violent outside, inner gloom and poetical worlds. The poem is written sensitively, to reveal secret daemons: “I fight with mercenary shadows / I fuck monsters of solitude / in the silence of cut flowers.”
To escape anguish and enter the realm of Rose-Pirogue, one has to let go. Words invite us to an almost carnal ecstasy. It is a book that burns, and in which love, desire, pleasure and death always go side by side: “I am death that fucks thriving pelvis / towards the light.” With undertaken eroticism, Delmaire convokes strong feminine figures, and female bodies are a metaphorical and pervasive landscape: “Rose-Pirogue appears / serrated nacre coast / where tomorrow has to sail / the shiny hull of the banquet.”
The text develops into multiple geographies of imagination: the Caribbeans, Africa, the slums of Western cities. Delmaire salutes a great family of writers, his “brothers and sisters of wonderment”. Rose-Pirogue is part of the multitude of literary works that answer to each other from all the corners of the earth, and that make one think that something, right now, is at stake, ready to break boundaries, a renewal of poetry that could be a landmark."
Poetry
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Red / Rouge
