Brault, Jacques (b. 1933). Canadian poet. He studied philosophy in Montreal, Paris, and Poitiers and then taught literature in Montreal. His popular origins and work as a docker while a student gave him his rugged common sense and earthy realism. But this unpretentiousness combines with sophisticated thought to make him one of the best commentators on the work of Nelligan, Grandbois, Saint-Denys Garneau (whose Œuvres (1970) he edited with Benoît Lacroix), and the writer he called ‘Miron le magnifique’. His training as a philosopher helped him to handle with enviable ease the themes of time, love, despair, and death in Alain Grandbois (1968). His early poems were collected as Mémoire (1968), celebrating his love for his father and for his brother Gilles, killed in Sicily in 1943. La Poésie ce matin (1971), its title from Apollinaire's ‘Zone’, with whom he could say: ‘J'écoute les bruits de la ville’, contains a moving, unsentimental tribute to his ‘petite mère’. Through L'En-dessous l'admirable (1975), Trois fois passera (1981), and Moments fragiles (1984), he remains one of the outstanding lyric poets of his age, his lyricism becoming steadily more spare, mixed with anger and a calm determination not to ‘crever dans la stupeur’.
Jacques Brault's extensive body of writings includes work of outstanding merit in most literary genres. He is the author of plays, novels and works of short fiction, translations and several seminal works of
Canadian literary criticism. However, it is primarily for his work as a poet that
Jacques Brault is admired by readers and known outside of Canada.[1]
Works
Mémoire — 1965
Allain Grandbois: poètes d'aujourd'hui — 1968
La poésie ce matin — 1971
Trois partitions — 1972
L'en dessous l'admirable — 1975 (translated into English as Within the Mystery)
Poèmes des quatre côtes — 1975
Agonie — 1984
Moments fragiles — 1984 (translated into English as Fragile Moments)
Poèmes — 1986
La poussière du chemin — 1989
Il n'y a plus de chemin — 1990 (translated into English as On the Road No More)
"Jacques Brault" in
Canadian Writers, an examination of archival manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence, journals and notebooks at
Library and Archives Canada
Footnotes
^Canadian Writers, an examination of archival manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence,
journals and notebooks at Library and Archives Canada
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