The new collection from Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poet and translator Erín Moure is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destruction.
The Elements is a family book, a thinker’s biography in poetry, and a polylingual homage. Poems about and for Moure’s late father — accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking “world” and “self” in a struggle against invasive powers — are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. By celebrating our ability to think and to revolt, it defends the human pull toward happiness and sovereignty, toward life, toward living. “The infinitely transmissible,” it says, “demands this polyvalent body.”
The new collection from Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poet and translator Erín Moure is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destruction.
The Elements is a family book, a thinker’s biography in poetry, and a polylingual homage. Poems about and for Moure’s late father — accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking “world” and “self” in a struggle against invasive powers — are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. By celebrating our ability to think and to revolt, it defends the human pull toward happiness and sovereignty, toward life, toward living. “The infinitely transmissible,” it says, “demands this polyvalent body.”
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Apr 9, 2019 |
| Specifications | 120 pages | 5.5 in x 8.15 in |
| Keywords | father; prose collage; polylingual; loss; grief; facing death; loss of a parent; families; Galicia; history and language; complex; challenging; translator; canlit; |
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Supporting Resources
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Excerpt |
| Written By |
ERÍN MOURE is a poet and translator (primarily of Galician and French poetry into English) who welcomes texts that are unconventional or difficult because she loves and needs them. Among other honours, she is a two-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award (in poetry and translation), a winner of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Nelson Ball Prize, a co-recipient of the QWF Spoken Word Prize, a three-time finalist for a Best Translated Book Award in poetry, and a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. |
| Written By |
|
ERÍN MOURE is a poet and translator (primarily of Galician and French poetry into English) who welcomes texts that are unconventional or difficult because she loves and needs them. Among other honours, she is a two-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award (in poetry and translation), a winner of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Nelson Ball Prize, a co-recipient of the QWF Spoken Word Prize, a three-time finalist for a Best Translated Book Award in poetry, and a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. |
“Moure’s wit and her eye for the beautiful infuse the poems . . . The collection is intensely rewarding, tender, and human as it attempts to name the unnameable, to bear the unbearable.” —Canadian Notes & Queries
“A formally exciting work.” —Montreal Review of Books