“No one suspects my music to have such precise references,” writes Elisabeth Belliveau, but it is precise references that give form to the work in her new collection, don’t get lonely don’t get lost. Poems, drawings, and animation (on an enclosed DVD) are assembled into one package, and Belliveau’s imagery unites it into a whole. Marie Antoinette; spiders; mountains; wolves; winter — these things and more create a web of references that gives Belliveau’s book coherence across its sprawl of forms.
The sections of the book alternate collections of pictures with sequences of poems. The artwork reflects the symbols that haunt the poetry, and vice versa; crucially, Belliveau is adept at using her symbols in cunning ways to reach emotional truths, while also letting them retain their ambiguity. For example, the first pages of the book show a drawing of a mountainside in Newfoundland; the last chapter, a transcription of the narration on one of the films on the DVD, is called “Margaret’s Mountain,” and we are told of the main character that “a mountain marks the middle of a city in her memory.” In between, over the course of the book, the image of mountains, of mountain ranges, of the island city centred by a mountain, repeats — the contexts slightly different, the complexity increasing.
If the book’s recurring themes are loss and loneliness, as fits the title, then the book mediates them with intimacy and history; the poetry presents relationships dissolving, lives lived in memories, but also ways to move on from these things. Still, the situations are enigmatic, presented glancingly, and I think sometimes might have been better served by being given more space, by being made more specific. I find the language, though spare and concrete, simple and unsurprising, and therefore occasionally unaffecting. At worst, the book seems too elliptical; when Belliveau draws faces, one wonders who these people are, what’s their story.
In a sense, that’s a testament to Belliveau’s artistic skill. Her drawing ability is remarkable. Organic forms are caught perfectly — trees and branches, owls and spiders, wolves and dogs — and the way they are deployed is intriguing. Shapes blend in collages, or are lent a gently occult air by fragments of text. Indeed, one of the sets of drawings is titled “Handbook of Spells,” tying in with a motif of spells in the poetry; it suggests ways to gain small powers, or ward off minor evils. This is everyday magic, growing from the everyday life of specific places.
The two short animated films, on the other hand, use stop-motion and collage to eliminate a coherent sense of place, fashioning surreal landscapes which deconstruct themselves, tearing themselves apart to let in new images or rearrange characters against a new landscape. “Margaret’s Mountain” is longer, at thirteen minutes; a heavily-accented narrator reads one of Belliveau’s poems, and it’s hard not to see that choice of speaker as affected. Personally, I preferred the gentler “Best Attempt” and its quiet near-monochrome.
There’s a considerable amount of craft in don’t get lonely don’t get lost. If sometimes Belliveau seems willfully obscure, there is still a sensuous pleasure in her artwork. And not only the assemblage of materials is fascinating, but also the way they’re deployed against loss; a kind of shoring-up of fragments against ruin. It’s a book that encourages the reader to look for connections: pieces of text from chapters throughout the book return as lines in “Margaret’s Mountain,” so the book becomes a collage of itself. It repays re-reading, and re-examination.
Elisabeth Belliveau will launch don’t get lonely don’t get lost at the Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore, 211 Bernard W., on Friday Sept. 3 at 7 p.m. With her will be Montrealer and fellow Conundrum author Alisha Piercy, who will be launching her double novel Auricle/Icebreaker.
Matthew Surridge is a Montreal-area writer. His criticism has appeared in The Montreal Gazette and The Comics Journal.
