Bernard-Pierre Vilboux: “Sesame of peaceful souls”

The sesame in question in this book by Bernard-Pierre Vilboux is poetry. Nevertheless, The author (born in Rennes in 1961) delivers here a vibrant tribute to authors who fill the shelves of his library. However, But he does it with this acute awareness of a certain collapse of poetry. Meanwhile, A feeling exacerbated by the disappearance of those who could be the most dear to him.

“The poets go/each in turn/They go through the paths/face their night (…) He leaves Beaucarne, Murat, Lavoué, Bobin” … Meanwhile, tells us Bernard-Pierre Vilboux. Moreover, “Poetry can no longer be read”, “poetry falls into tatters”, “a time, it was an art of living”. Similarly, To assert his persistent love of poetry, he confides in writing himself poems “under the attic”, bernard-pierre vilboux: “sesame peaceful souls” in a “lush bocage”. And, he adds, “poetry should be tackled/with measure, never head-on”.

The Vilboux poet is first of all a reader. He has read a lot. always enthuses on reading the tutelary figures of the Beat Generation : Snyder, Ginsberg and a few others. He read Brautigan, Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman (“Whitman flows in my veins”). But we also see him borrowing the footsteps of Herman Hesse from Lugano or those from Pasolini to Rome. On the French side, the list is long. Let us remember the tribute to Jaccottet “for the pleiad of elements that most of them ignore”. to Bobin “because his books act even when they are closed”, to Grall of which he praises “the granitic memory of a world memory”.

A good dose of humor

From the poet he says that he “shows the hidden side of everything/he likes to crunch the living, melancholy”. Vilboux is working there himself. rather on the humorous or sarcastic register to crunch this living one of which he takes the bet to twist his neck, for example of our flaws or our small foxes. Thus we read with delight this “inventory at the prevert” on our very essential everyday objects: on the vacuum cleaner which is there “to swallow the latest generation of mites”. on the mower that we use “to decapitate the people of the Eychers”, on the pressure cooker that we go to buy “to approach the salespeople of the electro-menager”.

Bernard-Pierre Vilboux does not take himself seriously. What he wants is as a reader. a poet, “flying here or there/a few scraps/of existence/for eternity”. Or, again, “climb bernard-pierre vilboux: “sesame peaceful souls” the verb, again and again/come back to the work, always”. What is called be a taulier of poetry.

Pierre Tanguy.

Sesame of peaceful soulsBernard-Pierre Vilboux, sources and books, 2025, 123 pages, 15 euros.