A Window Upon the World: The Poetry of Helene Dorion

Abstract

Focusing on her most recent collection, Le hublot des heures (2008), this article examines the unifying motif of the window in the writing of the Quebec poet Hélène Dorion. The titular ‘hublot’ (an aeroplane's porthole) is explored not only in relation to the evolving representation of the window in Dorion's work as a whole (a bloodstained window-pane is, for example, one of her earliest and most disturbing childhood memories), but also, within the composition of the chosen volume, as an emblem of the precarious opening and balance that she doggedly seeks to operate through the momentary reconciliation of opposites in the poem. From the particular to the universal, the private to the public, the local to the global, the trivial to the cosmic, Dorion has gradually shaped the visceral fracture of intimist writing into a more generous and delicately meditative opening, bidding poetic consciousness to function as a window upon our ever-changing world and to probe, amid technology that is increasingly invasive and controlling, what it means to be human.