Climates

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island and an honorary chief of the Mi’kmaq of Prince
Edward Island.

No translation from one language into another can ever recapture the
“breath and finer spirit” of the original. But Jo-Anne Elder and
veteran Fred Cogswell come close in their English version of
Chiasson’s poems. It is important to have a book like this. Our two
founding cultures, French and English, are so often woefully ignorant of
each other’s writing and writing traditions.

Each of the four sections in the book corresponds to a season.
“Spring: A Journal” presents poems about personal/political
struggles. The rhyming poems in “Summer: News Reports” tell about
people in Acadie. In “Autumn: Memoirs,” the Acadians speak. The
prose poems in “Winter: Legends,” which are the most successful
(more mature and more sustained in their treatment of the various
themes), focus on the harshness of the climate in every sense of the
word. Even in translation, one feels the evocative power of Chiasson’s
tangential thought, a style reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s own stream
of consciousness.

An introduction dealing with this talented poet’s ideas, concerns,
prosody, and poetic affinities would have enhanced this fine volume.