Montreal Before Spring

AUTHOR

Donald McGrath

Donald McGrath grew up in a fishing village on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, leaving at nineteen to study at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He has been a longshoreman, factory worker and waiter, and currently works as a translator in Montreal. He has published one previous poetry collection, At First Light (1995). His poems have appeared widely in periodicals, and one was selected for the longlist Web anthology of the 2011 Montreal Poetry Prize.

AUTHOR

Robert Melançon

Robert Melançon is one of Quebec’s most original poets. He won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his collection Blind Painting and shared the Governor General’s Award for Translation with Charlotte Melançon for their French version of A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll. A long-time translator of Canadian poet Earle Birney, Melançon has been the poetry columnist for the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir and the Radio-Canada program En Toutes Lettres. He lives in North Hatley, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.

Reviews

Praise for Montreal Before Spring

“Rich and deceptively simple … one of Quebec’s major poets.”—Globe & Mail

“Melançon deftly links seasons, the city space and their relation to age with his effortless metaphors … A thread of romanticism throbs beneath [his] poetry, [which] is intoxicated, fascinated with experiencing the surrounding world.”—New York Daily News

“Moving … Seldom have poems in translation so quickly won me over. Melançon addresses the reader like a trusted friend, without flattery … and free of Canadian clannishness.”—Patrick Kurp, Anecdotal Evidence