Heather Dohollau’s work dwells in the liminal space of many dialogues and translations – between French and English, poetry and the visual arts, the living and the dead. Her life trajectory took her from South Wales to Brittany, where in 1966 she embraced French as her “daughter tongue”—literally her children’s language—though the phrase also subtly deconstructs the assumed primacy of the mother tongue in a writer’s allegiances, as most of her poetic works were written (and all published) in French. The distance, or “wall,” interposed by her adoptive tongue proved fruitful, as she set out to re-enact in poetry many returns to the irreducible foreignness and redeeming transience of places, paintings and memories, confident that the “unknown language” of poetry was to be sought in the in-between. French also enabled her to fnd her way out of the poetic aphasia she experienced after the death of her mother in 1946, “a door we hadn’t known how to close / that had yet to exist” (The Doors Beneath, p.28).

Her poetic voice is characterised by rich philosophical undercurrents, sensorial immediacy and slow, defamiliarising rhythms that “withhold arrivals,” as well as deeply personal engagements with writers (Rilke, Woolf, Tsvetaeva), artists (Piero della Francesca, Van Gogh, Joan Mitchell) and thinkers (Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Derrida) who haunt her work rather like the cats in Bonnard’s paintings. Once an aspiring painter, she treated painters like Bonnard and Morandi as alter-ego figures, familiar with the tensions they inhabited and Modernist ambitions they met with fragile, individual means. In a still-life by Morandi, she once showed me fields, a hilly horizon. She saw and tasted immeasurable depth in Bonnard’s handling of the painting’s surface. This wasn’t mere playfulness on her part; she understood that restraint—which kept these artists within the limited, everyday subjects of their reclusive lives and within visual idioms resolutely undramatic by Modernist standards—was the very source of their eye- and mind-expanding artistic freedom. Just as Bonnard’s work, accused by some of his contemporaries of bourgeois introspection, is best understood with his tormented self-portraits in mind, the quiet hedonism of Dohollau’s own work must be perceived through the prism of her texts on loss, such as “My mother is in the garden.”

Her life was marked by successive exiles, from the postwar Wales of her early twenties and from the small island of Bréhat where she lived an insular life for nearly two decades, as well as by the untimely losses of her mother Phyllis and daughter Mikaëla, whose grave she now shares on Bréhat. Her first book, The Answer, was her only novel. It is a semi-fictional account of the last days and likely suicide of the proto-Existentialist philosopher Jules Lequier (1814-1862), whose work heightens the tension between freedom and necessity almost to breaking point. When Dohollau and I were co-writing her first biography in 2006, she chose to end it with a motto, “nevertheless,” referring in jest to Sarah Bernhardt’s motto “quand même” while affirming her existential need to write in spite of decades of hardship, uncertainty and extremely hard work as sole carer and breadwinner for her seven children. The extracts presented in this dossier are taken from The Doors Below. Grief is here mediated by the funerary liturgy of Morandi’s paintings and by the figures of Demeter and Persephone in their faithfully seasonal reunion across the doors of the underworld. Greek myth and Breton folklore overlap in the volume’s title, since doors into the underworld were thought to be buried underneath the island of Bréhat.

Dohollau’s poetry renounces any attempt to reconstruct the past. Instead, she allows it to well up into the present and the poem by lingering on the elusive qualities of light and air, the off-focus phenomena that reappear in the ageing speaker’s consciousness as sudden after-images. Her late piece “In praise of boredom” (An Amber Gaze, 2008, p.39) celebrates the slow temporality of attentiveness and receptivity to nature’s silent agency. Likewise, her practice of ekphrasis renders qualities of the gaze in the here and now of the viewing process, rather than describing the artwork’s structural features. For her, art can preserve the real only if it captures it at its most perishable, at the point of its emergence from and withdrawal back into absence. In the sequence quoted below on Pierro della Francesca’s frescoes, she zooms in on semantically minor details such as the Virgin’s hands, the angels’ curls, and Christ’s foot resting upon his grave. Her gaze probes the layering of paint and lingers on textures, inviting us to sense “under one’s fngers / a real shiver.” During the twelve years when I had the privilege of interviewing Dohollau in her house, she often took me to her small, intricate garden (or “land island,” as she called it) to pay my respects to her favourite plant, morning glory, whose blue or pink bloom only lasts a few hours, “and towards evening / is picked in its embers” (An Amber Gaze, 2008, p.57). In her life as in her work, Dohollau tended the ephemeral and courted the unseen, imagining that the wall at the back of her urban garden concealed the sea. Everconscious of the interdependence of light and darkness, the seen and the unseen, the remembered and the forgotten, she asks: “Why do we not do / what matters most? / To keep the impossible intact” (Lane of Doors, p.76).

Dohollau’s atypical profle may have slowed wider recognition of her work, but as early as the 1970s it was read by her friend Pierre Jean Jouve, as well as Jean Grenier. From the late 1980s she began her annual visits to Cerisy-la-Salle, a vital centre of French intellectual life where she met her friend and correspondent Jacques Derrida, as well as most prominent French poets and thinkers of her generation.

Clémence O’Connor