salmonpoetry.com | Anatomy of a Love Affair (My Life in the Movies) by Mélanie Francès

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Anatomy of a Love Affair (My Life in the Movies)
Mélanie Francès

ISBN: 978-1-903392-65-2

Page Count: 80

Publication Date: Monday, October 01, 2007

Cover Artwork: David Lefranc

About this Book

The poems of Anatomy of a Love Affair (My Life in the Movies) explore the constant interaction between everyday life and art and the imaginary space it provides all of us. In the first section which gives its title to the collection, a poetic sequence retells a real-life love affair from beginning to end, from the encounter to the break-up, through memories of love as it is remembered by the author and through the lens of pivotal and memorable movie scenes that seem to mirror her own experiences. With ritualistic cadence and use of the long line, the poems in this collection weave a web of stories that illustrate the ongoing interplay of personal experience and art, photographs, music and films that haunt us and make us who we are.

Author Biography

Mélanie Francès was born in Paris, France, in 1972. She grew up in France, but lived for four years in New Delhi, India, as a child. As a college student, she discovered her gift for writing and developed an interest in the arts and American literature. She later moved to Montreal, Canada to pursue her graduate studies at Concordia University and obtained an M.A. Degree in English and Creative Writing. In 2001, she published her first chapbook of poetry, The World is in your Head, with Ginninderra Press in Australia. She lives in Montreal where she works in communications and public relations and is currently working on her first novel about the immigrant experience and the birth of the movies at the beginning of the century in the USA.

Sample Poems

I. Champagne
(Coffee and Cigarettes by Jim Jarmusch)

It's winter now, the cold is a hunter after its prey,
the mad stroller flashes by in a beeline through the street,
it's winter now, on the frozen hill people carouse in a sleigh,
and in subzero temperatures, the great July seems obsolete.

In the distance, I can see summer and its slight bronze pale,
the hours that were long and stretched out in the sun and rain,
being in love with you can now be sketched, the truth become tale,
in the icy night, I wait for the right way to see beauty behind pain.

Two old men sit at a table on an afternoon break, drinking coffee,
the first rolls a fragile cigarette while his friend is lost in thought,
they inhale slow smoke like aristocrats in the basement of an armory,
and the oldest recalls a song by Mahler that their silence brought.

Two janitors in a black and white film hear "I have lost track of the world",
the voice of Janet Baker fills the storage room like a spell,
splits the dread in half, gathers two old souls in one swirl,
rolls above the floor, disappears in the shadow with the hint of a bell.

For a brief moment, two working men pretend that coffee is champagne,
they toast with paper cups to the glory of Paris in the nineteen twenties,
the broom sweeps the floor like a brush on a drum, a dancer with a cane,
and in their thin overalls, the two friends acquiesce as the fantasy flees.

It's winter now and I remember what being in love with you was like,
it felt like the song by Mahler, turning in circles like a weather vane,
turning working men into connoisseurs, slashing boredom with one strike,
ten minutes feeling like an eternity, and black coffee like champagne.