In Frayère, Yvon Rivard’s nine poems have drawn their inspiration from an equal number of silkscreened drawings in black and white. The book is “seminal”, as the artist herself has said. It is a place of spawning, a place pre-eminently pregnant. The plates give us a vision of steep-sloped river landscapes with the suggestion of logs floating on the black surface of the restless, shimmering water, all under mottled skies. . . . The classic severity of the various shades of black takes up the grim questioning that underlies the poem, in the ‘Trembling of the hand / At the bottom of the page.’

From: Duquette, Jean-Pierre. “Écrire L’image / Writing Pictures,” translated by Hugh Hazelton. Ellipse no. 48 (1992) pp. 23-24