Selected Poems, 1975-1981

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

Uguay was 26 when she died of cancer in 1981. In his introduction,
Jacques Brault notes that she knew time was running out. It is probably
for that reason that she could, through hard work and much
self-discipline, write poetry that is free of any facility. In his
translation, Sloate succeeds in transmitting her natural lyricism and
maturity.

There is no point in speculating what Uguay might have written. What
she has written—Signe et rumeru (1976), L’outre-vie (1979), and
Autoportraits (posthumously published in 1982)—must suffice. “I am
watching the world as it ends,” she writes, “and my desires as they
begin.” Even though in her poetry the line between sky and earth
becomes fainter and fainter and is finally erased, she is able to
celebrate landscapes and cityscapes, to perceive their colors, their
sounds and scents, to touch the trees and stones.

This collection is carefully prepared and well presented, a pleasure
for those who believe that poetry means listening to the world, ours and
that of others.