(Trois-Rivières, September 5, 2007) A jury, comprised of poets Rosalie Lessard, Carl Lacharité, and Anne Peyrouse has awarded the 2007 Félix-Antoine-Savard Prize to Suzanne Jacob for her poetic sequence "Ils ont été nombreux à répondre" which appeared in issue #125 of the literary magazine Estuaire. For her work, Jacob will receive a boxed set of Saint-Gilles paper (100 sheets), $ 250  and an honourary certificate in memory of the poet, all to be presented on the Sunday of Thanksgiving  weekend at the Centre Félix-Antoine-Savard. Jacob has also been invited to read at the Trois-Rivières International Poetry Festival, adding a $400 value to her winnings. 

Anne Peyrouse, who chaired the jury, said that committee members were impressed with the sheer volume of magazines vying for the prize, but despite the undeniable quality  of the submissions, they unanimously settled on Jacob’s text for its words, imbued with a nervousness but also with brilliance, their spasmodic motion, propelled by curiosity and an insatiable quest, always reaching for more. While the jury reached a concessus fairly soon in the deliberation process, it would be inaccurate to say that the thirteen poems penned by Jacob are easily accessible. Peyrouse drew attention, instead, to the compelling and memorable nature of the piece, and to its dramatic and poetic tension.

There is distinct  Kafka-esque quality to the sequence : or is this the mirroring, the duplicity, the mix of the real, imagined, and elsewhere reminiscent of Paul Auster? What is certain is that the world is chaotic and that the individual is sustained by his need to get to some particular point on the journey :  « that one would not have to dig / that which would not be a tomb to be dug » ( qu’on n’aurait pas à creuser/celle qui ne serait pas une tombe à creuser). Such an individual carries around his own « construction site » of life, meaning « responses from everywhere / from centuries gone before / and those ahead » (des réponses de partout / de tous les siècles derrière nous / et des siècles devant). A derivation of “answers to be dug” as though the world has become a kind of archeology of the response.

It is interesting to note how Jacob works with the response (fused with existence and death) and the sentence that would disclose to her the Verb capable of recreating the world. Waiting for this sentence, we see, we calculate the real as though we must desperately save the memory of the thing that is about to disappear. To see, to witness in the hope that the sentence finally emerges. If, at all, a hope, then one in vain, because if the Verb emerged liike something akin to a biblical Genesis, no one would recognize its transparence.

This is a poetry penned with concision (not a word too may) which speaks to the resistance of language, its instability, its fragility and its failure to be generative; it attests to how we slip into a world of enactment, where the virtual subtly replaces the real: