a new collection by Serge Prioul, stonemason and word mason

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Serge Prioul says: “these are fifty-eight poems on masonry.

On the masonry, okay.

But a little more than that… Mirouault the walls alone write to us is indeed a collection which says much more than the actions of the mason.

It is a form of diary kept by the author, while not so long ago he was erecting a wall for the house of his daughter Claire and her husband, in La Bazouge-du-Désert.

Place: Mirouault, a pretty name for a high place, “a hamlet of Pays Gallo” as Serge Prioul, himself a son of granite, describes it (he grew up and lives in Louvigné-du-Désert, Ille-et-Vilaine)

Masons’ words tool words

Since Serge Prioul was about to spend a good time at the wall, you might as well let it come to you sensations, thoughts, echoes of the countryside.

Silence, too. “There is no hurry, the work will last. You have to cut the angles, prepare the rubble, think about walls, think about poems too, since the solitude and silence of the construction site awaken verses” writes the author at the beginning of his collection.

These will be scribbled words “most often in the emergency and the dust from the hoods of the car and the concrete mixer”, so that they do not fly away. Or that their cement sets. because “the walls write to us”…

Mirouault the walls alone write to us is bricked with short poems. Short but dense, where everything counts.

Over the pages and days spent putting together this wall, Serge Prioul weaves a story that is also a tribute to the men and women of work.

It can be a simple reminder of a term, such as the word hook. “Crocher/was your father’s verb/the language of careers”.

Or the reminder of a moment, as when the worker speaks to himself, with “Words of a mason, words of tools/maintained forever”.

The matter of the world and language

This is Serge Prioul’s fourth collection of poetry in ten years.

A writer who was first a stonemason, then a textile worker, before finding in writing and poetry a path to personal appeasement.

It is now, as described Mickaël luck in the prologue of the collection, “poet with working hands, hands which work in the matter of the world and in that of language: laborer, mason or stonemason, word-cutters. »

Like another author, Thierry Metzto whom Serge Prioul dedicated his work and whose work he admires Diary of a laborer (1990, Gallimard-L’Arpenteur and Folio).

Mirouault, the walls write to usSerge Prioul, editions La Plume de Léonie, collection l’Âme des poetes, 92 pages. On sale from the author (tel. 06 46 26 62 88) and at the Librairie Majuscule-Mary in Fougères (€10).

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