Then the iron bells of Easter

Nick Tosches : Patti Smith--who wreaks her poetry in the New Jersey voice and ratted-hair rhythms which belong solely to those girls who, in the awful and mystic surety that there never was, is not, and never will be anything else to do, spend their dreams on violently nondescript boys who sit, like stains on the shirt of wonderment, endlessly drinking in bars with blue linoleum floors--is one of that scoundrel, immortal elite. When Smith performed at poetry readings at St. Mark’s Church in New York five years ago, the usual crowd of sissy poets were so intimidated that no poet dared follow her act (which consisted of her and Lenny Kaye on guitar), just as none of them would have dared follow Ezra Pound or Jim Morrison. Patti Smith is the first poet born of rock’n’roll; raised on the Crystals instead of the classics. [...] Truer and surer and less uneven than her previous albums, Easter is Smith’s best work. [...] “Easter” itself is a song of blinding sunshine and desolation. There is a child, the desperation of hand and cunt, and the recurring and mournful “Isabella, we are dying,” followed by the no less mournful-sounding “Isabella, we are rising.” The song (and the album) culminates in a slow, fevered orgasm of Christian imagery: “The spring, the holy ground. I am the seed, of mystery. The throne, the veil. The face, of grace...I am the sword, the sound; stained, scorned, transfigured child of pain...” Then the iron bells of Easter.

Easter, donc, puisque nous y voilà. Un dimanche de Pâques, Charleville, la famille Rimbaud : "Oh, le chemin mène au soleil. Mon frère, ma sœur, c'est le moment."