Poetry is the evidence of a life and not the life its effect. I's the ashes of something that's burning well. Sometimes you can confuse yourself and try to create ashes instead of fire . Leonard Cohen
(“Poetry is the trace of a life, and not life itself – the ashes of a thing that burns well. Sometimes, confusing them, we try to create the ashes rather than the fire.”)
Some poets who did not seek to create ashes, who did not sacrifice prey for the shadow.

In a completely different register – but isn't poetry this instance dedicated to reflecting the prodigality of the world, to celebrating the munificence of life and therefore welcoming the diversity of views that it arouses? – Cécile A. Holdban offers us All these things that make the night crack , a book written and drawn in the fall of 2021 during a literary and artistic residency at the Atelier du Bas Cros, in Ardèche. This is the third title in the “Écumes” collection from Éditions Exopotamie, the aim of which is to offer hybrid books based on texts and other forms of creation including pictorial expression. We know that for this poet who is also a painter, translator (and co-editor of the online magazine What remains ) writing, pictorial expression, language are at the heart of an approach aimed at bringing these mediums into dialogue in order to capture a resonance between interior space and exterior space. 
A successful bet here where the alternation of haikus, tercets and prose poems allows a subtle dialogue with the images (watercolors, pastels) - a beneficial addition of concreteness to supplement the necessarily abstract nature of the words -, to leave room for sensations and to thoughts.

I like to move 
what plays 
to be still

Painting eyes 
on the stones 
so that they open them

Nocturnal poetry where nothing is dark, where an incessant sound of genesis quivers from everything that is exchanged at the forefront of the moment in the evidence of immediacy. At the edge of things, on the edge between the visible and the invisible, between the poem and the unspeakable, there stands the watchful heart of Cécile A. Holdban – sometimes worried but never sentimental because he cannot lie to himself.
What more can be said that is not inconsistent and even harmful to the fundamental benevolence that emerges from the marriage of the brush and the words?
I dare to monopolize the poet's words and make them my own:

Of these secrets 
my human words 
won't be able to say anything

Patrick Corneau

Link to article:
Of everything, a little – in poetry (13) – Patrick Corneau

Link to order the book:
Cécile A. Holdban, All those things that make the night crack – Éditions Exopotamie