Seizing: Places

Patrick McGuinness was shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for this translation. Together with her fiction, essays and livres d'artistes, Hélène Dorion's poetry constitutes one of modern Québécois literature's foremost achievements. Seizing: Places (Ravir: Les Lieux) was awarded the Prix Mallarmé in 2005, the first time that a Canadian had won this prestigious prize. Comprising five sequences, it is arguably Hélène Dorion's most ambitious work to date. With an Introduction by Carcanet poet and Booker-longlisted novelist Patrick McGuinness. "My feeling is, the poems are grounded, and because of this they hold on to truthfulness in the moment, are in the everyday real and do open the reader (this reader anyway) to an adventure well out of the ordinary, and it says a lot to me about these poems that I want to quote all of them, to say 'listen' to this and to this and this." David Hart, Stride Hélène Dorion was born in 1958 in Québec City, and now lives in Montréal. She is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry, and numerous other prizes, the most recent of which was the Prix Senghor in 2011. Patrick McGuinness is the author of two poetry collections published by Carcanet – Jilted City (2010) and The Canals of Mars (2004) – and the Man Booker Prize-longlisted and Costa-shortlisted novel The Last Hundred Days (Seren, 2011). In 2009 he was made Chevalier des Palmes académiques for services to French culture, and in 2011 Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. This title is also available from Amazon as an eBook.

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