Climates

Climates is suffused with the single-minded desire to fully inhabit, and be inhabited by, a place: Acadie. The political push-and-pull of being Acadian is a constant, even when the mutability of personal life is in the foreground. The four sections of Climates each correspond to a season, and each is marked by unity of tone, atmosphere, and form.

AUTHOR

Herménégilde Chiasson

Herménégilde Chiasson is one of Canada’s most accomplished writer-artists. He is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, over 30 plays, and several collections of essays. A multi-disciplinary artist, he has received numerous awards for his work, including the Governor General’s Award for poetry, the Molson Prize, le prix France-Acadie, le Grand prix de la francophonie canadienne, the prestigious Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the Prix littéraire Antonine-Maillet-Acadie Vie. From 2003 to 2009, he served as Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick.

AUTHOR

Jo-Anne Elder

Born in East Centreville, New Brunswick, Canadian poet Fred Cogswell (1917-2004) served overseas in the Canadian Army during the Second World War. Cogswell published numerous collections of poetry including Black and White Tapestry (1989), In Praise of Old Music (1992) and The Trouble With Light (1996). In 1958, Cogswell, along with close friend and travelling poet Warren Kinthompson and a group of students and faculty from the University of New Brunswick, founded Fiddlehead Poetry Books, now one of Canada’s important small press publishers operating asGoose Lane Editions. He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1981.

Reviews

Herménégilde Chiasson is one of Canada’s most versatile artists — a photographer and printmaker, a playwright, a filmmaker, and a painter, illustrator, and set designer. Above all, though, he is a poet. The French edition of Climats, published in 1996, was short-listed for a Governor General’s Award. Chiasson’s eighth book of poetry, it is the first to be translated into English.

The poems in Climates are suffused with the desire to fully inhabit, and be inhabited by, a place: Acadie. The political push-and-pull of being Acadian is a constant, even amid personal upheavals. Boundaries between poetry and prose dissolve and reappear like the boundaries between thought and dream, creating a double consciousness that is particularly Acadian.

“Climates possesses a haunting and sustained clarity that meshes vividly with the writer’s superb linguistic authority and structural virtuosity (reminiscent of the work of David Jones in its commanding prose passages, the gruesome lyricality of Hubert Aquin)… The volume’s quartet of entries succeeds beautifully, tracking the emotional impoverishment and universal loneliness accompanying the perceived numbness of contemporary life.”
– Globe and Mail