Pascal Boulanger's 'Jamais ne dors' Poetic Shift

Pascal Boulanger's latest collection 'Jamais ne dors' marks a departure from his earlier 'spectral' poetry, moving toward a more deliberate treatment of sound mass. The verse lengthens and recomposes, incorporating prose that sometimes overwhelms, creating a diverse life across fifty interconnected pieces. The work aspires to an 'uninterrupted poetry' reminiscent of Éluard, centered on inexhaustible love as experience, sacrificing any aesthetic of love. This sacrifice, perhaps Girardian or augural, is deeply burned in a distancing of the self, expressed through Pascalian, prophetic, and biblical motifs. The morality of love, freed from morality, is sketched in evangelical and Pauline terms, evoking Jouve. Boulanger renounces a paradoxical aesthetic to capture reflections of Renaissance rhetorics—the Song of Songs, Maria Alcoforado's classicism, or John of the Cross's mysticism. The book's most mysterious fold lies in the commerce of genders, the ebb and flow of a very present 'I,' whether masculine or 'other'—feminine—invoking Lévinas's ontology of the same and the other opening onto infinity. 'Être humain' is an experience offered exclusively under one of two forms, man/woman. Thus, 'Jamais ne dors' cannot be seen as merely lyrical; here, lyricism exists only to surpass itself. Jean-Marie Perret reviews the collection.