Every Minute Is First

Every Minute Is First, by Marie-Claire Bancquart, translated from the French by Jody Gladding, is the first book by Bancquart to appear in English. The titular “first” appears to be missing a preceding definite article, as if to suggest firstness is itself a characteristic of “every minute.” Later in the book, the whole line is unveiled: “Every minute is first, when the garden / shares its light with the silence.” Here, each minute’s “firstness” is contingent on a mysterious event in a garden we cannot access or observe. Bancquart’s poems, too, appear like mysterious events in language that cannot be explained, even as they communicate a sense of impending death.

Bancquart finds the smallest of gaps through which to squeeze some big ideas. In “Alone,” she writes:

And you
you wander about in your veins
you climb
your thoracic cage.

You are alone

the words have only passed through.

In another poem: “you are one with that thin, fundamental gap / approaching / the beginning of the abyss.”

Bancquart’s poems speak to mortality as if in a work of domestic theater, where the tension is palpable:

September, eleven o’clock in the morning, without you.

Everything’s pretending
cars in the street
small creatures, spiders, insects on the balcony.

The key turns, the eggs break.

It’s even possible to think about Ulysses, the Talmud, Venice.

The truth, however, is that I’m standing
on a very approximate edge of things.

In the last 13 years of her life, Bancquart wrote eight volumes of poetry; many of these works explore aging and a sense of her own looming obsolescence, which is not uncommon for poets writing in the later stages of life. In addition to terror and worry, however, these poems also exhibit a certain idiosyncrasy, a move toward cosmic strangeness:

It’s sad
around you?

It’s already dying?

Listen to your pleura sing a little
with the wind,
leafing through the tree, become its friend,
consider yourself a paraphrase of autumn.

If this vital operation
is successful,
you’ll no longer be a stranger to seeds.