At the Limit of Breath

"I wanted this to be a narrative. So finally Jean-Luc went all the way: every line in the script a quotation from somewhere else. Every blessed line. Love doesn't die. It's people who die. Love just goes away." -from "NOUVELLE VAGUE / New Wave (1990)" Stephen Scobie celebrates "the greatest film director of his age" with poetry exploring 44 of Godard's films. Subtle yet profound unities play from poem to poem. Characters, locations, images, and the generous use of quotation jump-cut and recur to send the imagination reeling through the larger works of both artists. Readers will be seduced to linger within the writing and encouraged to seek beyond, to Godard's own oeuvre. The book is sharply envisioned and carefully cadenced so as to delight readers who may not be familiar with Godard's films. Those already acquainted with Godard's work will find At the limit of breath a most rewarding experience. Stephen Scobie reflects on the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard with poems for 44 Godard films. Front Flap: Stephen Scobie celebrates "the greatest film director of his age" with poetry exploring 44 of Godard's films. Subtle yet profound unities play from poem to poem. Characters, locations, images, and inter-textual quotation jump-cut and recur to send the imagination reeling through the larger works of both artists. Readers will be seduced to linger within the writing and encouraged to seek beyond, to Godard's own oeuvre. The book is sharply envisioned and carefully cadenced to delight readers who may not be familiar with Godard's films. Those already acquainted with Godard's work will find At the limit of breath a most rewarding experience. Back Cover: Here is light and here are soldiers here are bosses here are children here is light and here is joy . here is the universal wound here is night here is the virgin here is grace and here is light and here is light and here is fog and here is adventure and here is fiction and here is reality and here is documentary and here is movement and here is cinema and here is the image and here is sound and here is cinema -- JLG, Scénario du film Passion, 1982 Back Flap: Stephen Scobie was born in Scotland and has lived in Canada since 1965, teaching at the Universities of Alberta and Victoria. A widely published poet, he won the Governor General's Award in 1980 for McAlmon's Chinese Opera. He has also published extensively in the criticism of Canadian literature. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Stephen Scobie lives in Victoria. "Stephen Scobie's newest collection is a chronological, poetic study of the films of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. And like the work of the man about whom Scobie writes, the book is pleasingly esoteric and sharply focused.... this book studies and examines Godard in a sharp and thrilling way, and Scobie invites his reader to further explore the world of the great filmmaker. Scobie's knowledge of Godard is vast, to be sure, but his poetics-and his love for the films-are what truly shine here." Kimmy Beach, ARC Poetry Magazine, February 2014 [full review at http://arcpoetry.ca/?p=7755] "In the poem on one of Godard's masterpieces, Weekend, Scobie writes: 'What a rotten film / All we meet are crazy people / eating each other.' A funny barb, with a hallucinatory development in the image, that works against expectation by insulting Godard's film, the stanza stands on its own. At the same time, the 'insult' contains a quotation from the film, thus replicating Godard's own method of incessant quotation-deepening the poem for those who know the film…. Scobie's poems intelligently engage Godard's films." "The collection is held together by a dense net of recurring motifs.... At the Limit of Breath is a textual space where Godard's characters, places, images, and actors take on a Pirandellian existence, crossing borders of both poems and movies."