I love the way the gap between French speakers and English speakers echoes the gap between the living and the gone. Denise Duhamel somehow always stands the reader in the one spot where the luminous exalts what she tells us. There is nothing mundane in the world she takes us through.
Being half-québécois myself, I can appreciate Duhamel's childhood experience of listening to, and trying to understand, francophone relatives speaking French with her parents while she herself was raised as an anglophone.
The poem feels like someone opening a childhood memory with both hands, gently, as if afraid it might fade while being told.
Every detail the cat clock, the carnival glass hen, the baked beans carries the warmth of a world held together by family rituals.
There’s a tenderness in how the sisters watch the adults, half‑lost in a language they weren’t allowed to inherit.
The French they try to catch becomes part of the music of those gatherings, something felt more deeply than understood.
The kitchen, full of gossip and food, becomes a shelter where the children learn belonging through smell and sound.
The poem holds both sweetness and ache, knowing that everyone who filled those rooms is now gone.
The present‑day replicas feel strangely hollow, reminders that objects can be replaced but the people who animated them cannot.
Memory becomes the real heirloom fragile, luminous, carried quietly inside the speaker.
There’s a soft grief in realizing that the world of one’s childhood survives only in these small, vivid fragments.
In the end, the poem isn’t just about being “vintage” it’s about loving a world that time has taken but memory refuses to let go.
I love the way the gap between French speakers and English speakers echoes the gap between the living and the gone. Denise Duhamel somehow always stands the reader in the one spot where the luminous exalts what she tells us. There is nothing mundane in the world she takes us through.
I really feel like I was there with you, tick tocking the minutes down to New Years. What a sublime work.
Being half-québécois myself, I can appreciate Duhamel's childhood experience of listening to, and trying to understand, francophone relatives speaking French with her parents while she herself was raised as an anglophone.