H. Aizenman, The Enchanting Poems of Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018), from The New Yorker Archive
Hannah Aizenman, The Enchanting Poems of Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018), from The New Yorker Archive
Article paru sur le site du New Yorker, 8 mars 2018.
he poet and teacher Lucie Brock-Broido, who contributed work to The New Yorker for more than two decades, died on Tuesday, at the age of sixty-one. Brock-Broido’s poems possessed a formal rigor and a supernatural sensibility that placed her in a lineage of revelatory American poetic voices like Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath.
Five years before Brock-Broido’s first poem appeared in the magazine (“Carrowmore,” in 1994), Helen Vendler reviewed her début collection, “A Hunger.” Vendler identified in Brock-Broido’s work a “slangy and morose self-mockery” that was just one part of her “hypnotic ventriloquism”; her language, Vendler noted, was “capable of sliding off the rails of ‘English’ entirely.”
Brock-Broido’s sly, baroque diction carries through to later work, such as “Noctuary” (which the poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht read on The New Yorker’s poetry podcast, in 2014), and “Moon River,” from the October 21, 2013, issue. Even Brock-Broido’s more overtly political poems bear qualities of the whimsical, the fabulous, and the incantatory. Both “Heat,” also from 2013, and “The American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act,” which ran in the September 26, 2016, issue, probe sociocultural and moral problems with enchanting and urgent musicality, meant to unsettle any certainty of fixity regarding the world or one’s position in it. (...)