SI LOIN DES CYPRÈS

Lélia Young dedicates her new collection of poetry to "the familiar stranger who awakens metaphor." The ties of love and empathy between people and the world around them is the main focus of the book. However, the poet also constantly acknowledges the presence of mortality, silence, and negativity in the world:

Chaque être est au bord de l'absence et sa voix flirte sur la faille du silence[...]
Je me souviens de la peur de perdre les aimé-e-s et plus tard le souffle de ma terre.

Young divides the collection into three distinct parts. The first, "Between You and Me: An Oxymoronic Reading," charts the evolution of the love between a female speaker and her male partner. This love provides the inspiration for writing poetry and celebrating life:

Avec toi passer dans la nuit d'être
Avec toi jusqu'au bout de la vie
Pour que le cauchemar se dénoue
Et laisse passer le jour.

The second section of the book, "In the Body of the Python," functions as the flipside of the first section. Here the poet is concerned with denouncing cruelty, evil, and violence-for example, violence resulting from religious fanaticism, which the python symbolizes:

Ô cruel
[...] ta griffe attend patiemment l'ultime mouvement espéré de ta proie
Le voilà dans l'incohérence de sa folie
à tourner après sa queue
à tuer au nom d'un irrationnel religieux
livrant son humanité aux canyons des vautours.

Finally, in the third section, "Torsades" ("Interweavings"), Young brings together the two domains of cruelty and love. She juxtaposes them in order to underscore the message that our survival depends on an altruistic and caring, charitable interaction with, and openness to, one another. In the end, her poems affirm a belief in the necessity of the evolution of humanity - above all, by means of a renewal of love in the broadest sense.

Les Cahiers de la femme, Canadian Woman Studies, Vol. 21, No 2, Novembre 2001, p 147.