No End to the World

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

Hélиne Dorion is one of Quebec’s finest poets. Her work has been
published in Quebec, France, and Belgium, and it has been translated
into several other languages. Translated here into English by Daniel
Sloate, a poet himself and a craftsman in the art of translation, her
poems are meant to accompany the reader along his or her way, “to the
swing of day and night,” making pain cease “to pound at the
window” of thoughts.

When Dorion’s poems are long, they seem to take detours on bending
roads. Others offer unfinished lines. Time is visibly one of her
preoccupations. Her poems on some pages seem to rush, yet on other pages
follow “the trickle of time.” In other words, they can be of very
different rhythms.

Dorion sees the poet as a geographer, a navigator, a healer leading us
through history, through our feelings and experiences, to a better
understanding or at least a perception of life. No End to the World is a
joy to read.