Mirabel
by Pierre Nepveu
translated by Judith Cowan
In this powerful and original collection, Pierre Nepveu, one of Quebec's foremost poets, recreates the tragic circumstances surrounding the construction of Montreal's Mirabel airport. In an exceptional English translation that is wrenching in the shifting sadness of its lines, these poems are brilliantly disturbing, ambitious in their moral force, and universal in scope. Mirabel (under its original title, Lignes aériennes) won the Governor-General's Award and the International Poetry Festival's Grand Prize in 2003, and has already been hailed as a contemporary masterpiece of French-Canadian poetry.
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"An epic poem that acknowledges the dispossessed, this book is a journey into sorrow and compassion, a plaint that strikes universal chords in its evocation of the disaster. This is an exceptional work, exemplary in its engagement and urgency." —from the Governor General's Award jury
"[The English translation of Mirabel is] a book that reads as if it were an original production while remaining faithful in spirit and verbal adroitness to its source. ... This is translation operating at the highest level." —Books in Canada
"An eerie, slanted glimpse into one of [Canada's] most unlikely epic disasters: the birth and death of an airport... Nepveu’s elegy is darkly, cleanly worded, forcing us to contend with a past which has left the spacious fabrications of the present rattling empty." —The Dominion
