'Praise for Hush: a fugue
'Dominique Hecq writes through dulled topographies of mourning, avowing death is a “singular fear of finitude against a background of black light”. Autobiographical, and sharply particular, Hush takes readers into an abyss where “grief is a caesura” and loss means “being hostage to a ghost”. But this book is not only a poignant elegy to “losing your mother tongue and cracking your own voice”; Hush is also an incandescent lament from an “un / harmed” speaker locating the possibilities and lexicons of dénouement. Silencing the undertones of a surpassing grief, Hecq’s quest is finally epic and heroic.' –DAN DISNEY
'“Life goes on, they say,” says Dominique Hecq in her startling and moving new book of lined and prose poetry, Hush. Then, “Life goes on leaving.” A response to the death of a child, charting the near death and revival of a marriage and family, Hush is the lyric meditation of a true scholar, deeply inflected by theory but driven by the urgencies of the body. Early and late, it poses unanswerable questions—“Why is white white?”—and answers them by returning to the world of “Chalk, rice, zinc / / Crystal falls / / ” and, devastatingly, “Limestone graves,” before the language of the world disintegrates. Seeming at first to span a year of seasons, then suddenly encompassing fifteen years, the poem charts a remarkable inner journey, which begins in starvation, a refusal of the sensuous, but finally recollects not joy so much as presence. The world reemerges in water, birds, flowers, and most of all food, prepared at first as sacrifice, for others, until it makes itself present—first through color but also through smell, through sound, and literally through ink—and becomes the poet’s communion.' –KATHARINE COLES
Dedication: For David
'To some readers, like me, Dominique Hecq’s Hush: A Fuguemay be daunting at first appearance. This starts with the cover, which has the sort of self-assured, intellectual air I find a little intimidating. A wary look inside reveals unstable text formatting – blocks of dense prose broken by verse, haiku, couplets, one-liners. And whether you do your page-flicking right or left-handed, you surely cannot avoid noticing a list of references at the back, containing some imposing names: Barthes, Freud, the dreaded Derrida, Lacan. Hesitating on ‘Heaney, S.’, and ‘Rimbaud, A.’, I found myself hoping for reassurance. Some readers will undoubtedly have put the book down by this point, but others love a challenge and they will certainly find Hecq’s book stimulating. It is rich and satisfying on many levels, whether or not you enjoy Derrida’s games.' (Introduction)
'Dominique Hecq’s Hush: A Fugue examines the death of a child from a mother’s perspective and the harrowing aftermath of such an inexplicable event. In this autobiographical work, Hecq finds language for a profound loss, one that almost defies articulation.' (Introduction)
'To some readers, like me, Dominique Hecq’s Hush: A Fuguemay be daunting at first appearance. This starts with the cover, which has the sort of self-assured, intellectual air I find a little intimidating. A wary look inside reveals unstable text formatting – blocks of dense prose broken by verse, haiku, couplets, one-liners. And whether you do your page-flicking right or left-handed, you surely cannot avoid noticing a list of references at the back, containing some imposing names: Barthes, Freud, the dreaded Derrida, Lacan. Hesitating on ‘Heaney, S.’, and ‘Rimbaud, A.’, I found myself hoping for reassurance. Some readers will undoubtedly have put the book down by this point, but others love a challenge and they will certainly find Hecq’s book stimulating. It is rich and satisfying on many levels, whether or not you enjoy Derrida’s games.' (Introduction)
'For over twenty years, conflicting claims in the construction of identity have been central to the problems of re-defining autobiography. Elizabeth Bruss (1976) referred to autobiography as a literary practice that is in continuous flux. Georges Gusdorf (1980) problematised the relationship between subjective and objective memory in autobiography. Paul Eakin (1992) drew attention to the shifting boundaries between fact and fiction in self-representation. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2001) argued that autobiographical writing assigns both singular and multiple subject positions to the representation of identity. Contemporary experimental poetry inflected by the autobiographical drive actively engages these conflicting issues within the context of autofiction. In this paper, I touch upon the relationships between autobiography and fiction and poetry to explore how different modes of representation raise questions regarding the construction of identity. I will focus on my own work, specifically on the composition of Hush: A Fugue (Hecq 2017), first written as a novel, then as a memoir and, finally as cross-generic text. Because the paper revisits the composition of a work which took over two decades to write, it is written in inductive mode, only arguing its point by allusion and accretion in order to highlight the speculative departures at work in the process. These speculative departures, or fugal alternatives, concern the discrepancy between the reading ‘I’ and the writing ‘I’ on the one hand, and the theorist and ‘the breathing author’ on the other. These alternatives are shown to underscore the active character of identity formation in the writing process and the retrospective nature of (embodied) knowledge.' (Publication abstract)
'Hush: A Fugue is Dominique Hecq’s sixth book of poetry. Her poetry – like her other creative and scholarly work – is informed by the wealth of her personal and intellectual experience, reflecting issues of physical and linguistic dislocation as well as the influence of a psychoanalytic and post-structural literature on loss, grief and subjectivity. This collection clusters explicitly around the theme of loss; in particular, it retraces a very personal narrative of the loss of a child to cot death. Years may have passed, other children arrived and grown – but the shocking ‘white wax’ of the beloved baby’s face remains a potent presence in his mother’s life. Almost twenty-five years later, this powerful and disturbing collection both marks the enduring presence of the lost child and traces the almost unbearable experiences of grief and mourning, finally possible to articulate within the flexibility of the poetic voice.' (Introduction)
'Dominique Hecq’s Hush: A Fugue examines the death of a child from a mother’s perspective and the harrowing aftermath of such an inexplicable event. In this autobiographical work, Hecq finds language for a profound loss, one that almost defies articulation.' (Introduction)
