A Season For Birds

Pierre Morency was born in Lauzon, near Quebec City. He is a prolific poet and playwright, and also has written movingly of his experiences as a naturalist. He is one of the few Quebec poets who speaks of love simply for the sake of love, of women as women, and not as the femme-pays (“land woman”). As for the land itself, in poems at once surrealistic and lyrical, he laments the corroding indifference of crass consumer life. “The poet will avoid speaking of peace,” he says, “preferring to work with the words knowledge, nature, tribe, power, blindness, light, crowd, shelter, fog. He will keep away from schools, preferring to hang around shopkeepers and women … With people in power he will be like a cat, forgetting their caresses and dreaming only of horror.”

Pierre Morency is among the most engaging and interesting of the Québécois poets, capable of exploring many forms and techniques, from the prose poem to the love lyric. As a matter of fact, it is Morency who has brought real flesh to the bones of Quebec love poetry. A startling collection, startling well translated by Alexandre Amprimoz.