Liberation and Modernity in the Wake of the War - Literature and Painting in Quebec: From Imagery to Identity - page 219

have the potential to bear further fire, as they do in the next verse when
they produce embers ('braise') that crown the flowers in a regal way,
surpassing everyday reality by artistic endowment: culture enhances
nature, and fire becomes an emblem of poetry itself. If Claude Gauvreau
can be called 'un pur poète de la nuit' (a pure poet of the night), then 'la
parole de Roland Giguère est flamme. Elle en a la rapidité, la puissance
de dévastation et le pouvoir d'éclairer; flamme obscure et flamme
claire.' (Roland Giguère's language is flame. It has the same devastating
force and power to illuminate; dark flame and light flame.)23 23
Paul Chamberland, himself a poet of the same generation, includes
Giguère among a group of 'foundation' poets, and although his discus-
sion does not include the poems above, it serves as an apt explanation
of the significance of the garden and its position in relation to 'place'
and 'space': 'the insistent return to things that are elemental , basic, and
earth-related, so that the resultant enracination can bring fertility … the
search here is for a central place , the “ultimate setting” that is the only
location worthy of the act of foundation. By virtue of its position, the
central place dominates the space around it: to be in it is to be able to
participate in the world, to plunge into the stream of universal life. The
time of origin opens up vast new spaces' (127).
Unlike the garden in early works, where it tended to represent a para-
dise - nation, family, or individual - lost and thus an entity to be re-
gained, and unlike the garden in Angéline de Montbrun , which was at first
a repository of emotions and memories, then a symbol of their waning
and destruction, and finally an indicator that the only paradise is a spiri-
tual one, the garden for Giguère and Pellan is one to be 'cultivated,' con-
structed - on the page or canvas - where it then stands for the victory of
the creator over physical, political, and personal loss. Far from the closed
place marking a regression and retreat from surrounding space, the gar-
den has become a place of 'foundation,' 'cultivation,' opening up new
spaces. As Giguère proclaims in 'Paysage dépaysé' (landscape lost) from
Les armes blanches (1954), dedicated to his fellow painters, since the land-
scape was no longer the same ('le paysage n'etait plus le même') and had
lost its beauty and meaning, it was time to redo the landscape ('le pay-
sage était à refaire'), be it physical, artistic, or political (the homophonic
link between 'paysage' and 'pays' is hard to ignore, especially for
Giguère, as the poem's title suggests). 24 As Maugey puts it, 'le poète est
alors en mesure d'opposer à ce monde infernal la vision d'un monde à
reconstruire' (151; the poet is thus in a position to oppose this infernal
vision with a world to be constructed). Like the garden within it, the