Seizing:Places

Seizing: Places (Ravir: Les Lieux) was awarded the Prix Mallarme in 2005, the first time that a Canadian had won this prestigious prize. It is arguably Helene Dorion's most ambitious work to date, consisting of five sequences ('Seizing: Cities'; 'Seizing: Shadows'; 'Seizing: Mirrors; 'Seizing: Windows' and 'Seizing: Faces') and although she has written plenty since its publication, there is something culminative about this book. The book is prefaced by an introduction by the translator, and there is an afterword by the author, both of which are invaluable to those encountering Dorion's work for the first time.

Table of Contents:
Introduction / 7, I Ravir: les villes- Seizing :Cities/15 II Ravir: les ombres - Seizing : Shadows / 39 III Ravir: les miroirs - Seizing : Mirrors / 55 IV Ravir: les fenetres - Seizing: Windows / 75 V Ravir: les visages - Seizing : Faces / 91

About the Author :
Helene Dorion was born in 1958 in Quebec City, and now lives in Montreal. She studied philosophy at the University of Laval, and published her first collection of poems in 1983. Since then her prolific oeuvre - poetry, fiction, essays, and livres d'artistes - has constituted one of modern Quebecois literature's major achievements. She is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry, and numerous other Canadian and international prizes the most recent of which was the Prix Senghor in 2011.

Review :
Dorion's translator, the poet and novelist, Patrick McGuinness, has written an immensely erudite introduction that addresses the difficulties her work poses and suggest ways to read it. In fact, I'd argue this introduction is essential to a newcomer to Dorion's work as I am. It includes her own description of poetry as a way of 'crossing language' and McGuinness's analysis of the tradition she is writing in. He tells us that, like Paul Valery, who believe poetry was an operation performed on language, Dorion's poetry "repays its debt to thought". It goes without saying, therefore, that Dorion is demanding to read. She organises her fragments into five sections: cities, shadows, windows, mirror and faces and while she is on record as describing it as a collection about the enchantment of places inside and out, it is unmistakably conceptual. She uses the French "tu" to engage her reader but often uses "we", so the overall impression is of universal experience and big views. The themes that emerge from Dorion's fragments include the damage of history. This materialises from the section 'Seizing:Cities'. We experience the relationsip between land, water and sky, the influence of poets, art and archetypes: "Through so many faces, I enter / my own face." She uses fragments like Lebanese poet Etel Adnan whose work is also concerned with history, language and ideas. McGuinness describes it as "a sort of mosaicised mode of poetry". Jackie Wills, The Warwick Review, 2013