Seizing: Places

Seizing: Places (Ravir: Les Lieux) was awarded the Prix Mallarmé in 2005, the first time that a Canadian had won this prestigious prize.

Hélène Dorion is one of Quebec's most outstanding and decorated poets. Winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Prix Mallarmé and numerous other Canadian and international prizes, she is a prolific writer, not only of poetry but also fiction, essays and artist's books.

Seizing: Places is perhaps Dorion's most ambitious work so far. Consisting of five sequences — 'seizing' cities, shadows, mirrors, windows and faces — this collection is a distillation of perception, memory and experience, a slow-burning, culmin-ative work which gives itself time and space to unfold, poetry which, in Dorion's own words "is as much a state of being as a mode of writing".

Characteristic of Dorion's work is her refusal to erect artificial barriers between the made world and the found world; she is as attuned to Quebec's urbanism and its cultural accretions as she is to its wide-open spaces, lakes and mountains, big skies, seasons and weather.

This is a work of big themes and attentiveness of vision which Patrick McGuinness's impeccable translation makes available to the English-language reader in all its subtlety of language and intensity of expression.

ISBN 978-1906570-12-5 (pbk)
978-1906570-17-0 (hbk)
978-1908376-54-1 (ebk)
Size: 216 x 138 mm
Pages: 128
Published December 2012

» About Hélène Dorion