Mayan Godmaire, Yesterday’s Tigers

Published in 2021 through rob mclennan’s above/ground press, Mayan Godmaire is a former student of Sarah Burgoyne from Montreal’s Dawson College, where Godmaire also served as editor of several publications of. Additionally, they have an intriguing essay written as dialogue about decolonizing nature in the online Dawson English Journal, Ecocriticism and the Decolonisation of Nature: A Discussion.

I hesitate to write Dialoghi con Leucò as a potential allusion above, but then I open the chap and read the first word: Persephone. I redouble my too quickly abandoned assurance that there is a hint of Cesare Pavese in Godmaire here. But there is very much also a deliberately 21st-century ecopoetics edge whose ingrained spirituality reminds me fondly of the late speeches and works of Pier Giorgio di Cicco:

When all the cars will have been taxed or tolled on their way to the cities, when bike paths and parks will have reconfigured our neighbourhoods, when safe and cleaner transportation has cut emissions, a fundamental question will remain. Is the safe city, the sanitized city, the sustainable city the same as the livable city? If all we want is clean and well-designed cities, it will likely come to pass. But in the long run, to save the environment means that we will want to save the environment not just for ourselves, but for each other. And to reverence each other means that we will have to discover each other.

There is something theatrical about this first page of text that I would not want to spoil by quoting directly, but it is an invocation not dissimilar to an epilogue as spoken by a chorus. We’re not in media res; we are part of the ritual that is audience-performance.

In the here and now, in our ides of March, pestilence’s winter opened the cave for us all to crawl within, again and again.

Is everybody in?
Is everybody in?
The ceremony is about to begin.

The very next page announces an onomatopoeia: BUZZ, SWIRL, SMOKERINGS, BUZZ BUDS BUZZ. There is a drama unfolding here, although maybe I am too TV-pilled to see anything but Euphoria in my head when I read it. Very much not a bad thing. This is story-telling done right. The neverending genderedness of the French language.

What follows next is a little hazy: biking through a hangover into the woods at Oka Beach. This work is more Montreal than Jason Freure’s City of Losers.

“I once had a very strong feeling that this is my last life,” I tell Bermalva. The shaman’s expression does not change.
“That’s possible,” she says.
I can know myself. Je ne dois que m’unir au rhythm qui jetait leurs fleurs.

Franglais for: I mustn’t but become one with the rhythm throwing their flowers.

I hope I parsed that right.

Then, an ending that casts no aspersions:

I am an empty chalice.
The midnight whirl-pool, formless.

I won’t spoil any would-be readers with what I see on the next page over. I had to laugh at myself about it.