Books in Canada
Bearing the requisite fleur-de-lis on its cover and title pages, David Solway's Demilunes is intended to give readers a glimpse into the "unique phenomenon of Québécois poetry and culture." These "little windows" reveal widely disparate interiors as the reader peers into Québec's "harsh and sustaining" landscape, fecund and complicated history, passionate devotion to its religious heritage, and luridly secular sensuality. The accomplishment that astonishes most is that the collection manages to remain cohesive while presenting such a variety of poetic material: poems which are urban and rural, imagist and conceptual, modern and contemporary. What unifies these very different pieces, from Claudine Gaudreau's lyrical and musing "In the World" to Paul-Marie Lapointe's experimental sound-based "Forbidden Fruit", is the quality and consistency of the translation. Solway's language never seems forced or awkward, but hums with the proper tension, a tautness which brings each poet's distinct voice into sharp relief. While for select readers a bilingual edition might have provided more scope on this literature, the space saved allows Solway to draw from a greater breadth of sources and to select more material. The end result is a harmonized, well-balanced collection of translated poems from "the other half of the place we live in."
Matthew J. Trafford (Books in Canada)
