From the roof your eyes flow watching me at the end of the light I see you born deep in my hands at the same time as the words carry me off to the end of myself    I no longer seek my face imprinted on the silk of your hands    I walk on a path that no one knows    it turns before it can be taken    only those who have cultivated the dreams that carry us to the end of night know which detour has to be taken to meet you

I lost my way a thousand times before seeing myself in the fork of a forest that enchants its birds and carries its trees on the back of its love    it is your name I spelled in the depths of my prayer    the one I recite watching the water flowing over the stones of hope that carries me to see you again one day with my eyes of flesh and your eyes of a child who has found their mother

Translated by Howard Scott

Jean-Noël Pontbriand was born in 1933 in Saint-Guillaume d’Upton. He dedicated his life to teaching, primarily literary creation from 1982 to 2013. In addition to this work, he wrote essays (Les mots à découvert, Les voies de l’inspiration), poetry (about a dozen collections, including Éphémérides, Lieux- passages, L’il nu and Jack Kerouac blues), and two novels (Taches de naissance and Vous serez comme des Dieux). His most recent collection of poems, entitled Naissances, was published by Les Écrits des Forges.

archbishop's park
ravens on the grass
gulping down earthworms

ventilation noises
from the end of the great hall
echoes of voices

waves on the sand
soothe a child
brought back by the sea

mist over La Salle
from one shore to the other
crickets and tree frogs

at the entrance of the old monastery
mosquito welcome

ruins of a church
the young mother breastfeeding
her baby in the shade

scorching mid-August
on the doorstep of the chapel
an old woman is mopping

a bench at sunset
a mom two grandmas
baby on the lap

wind in the poplars
the shadow of an herb on the
buddha's knee

willows in the wind
on the banks of La Salle
Nepalese songs

dry grass trail
I was a horse child
galloping full speed
after all these years
I still am

Translated by Howard Scott

Bertrand Nayet publishes short stories, narratives, poems and tales. He writes plays, creates scenery, acts with Manitoban theatre troupes, draws, paints and illustrates. A founding father and secretary in perpetuity for the Collectif post-néo-rieliste, as well as the founder and director of Kukaï Rouge, Bertrand is the writer in residence at Maison Gabrielle-Roy, in Saint Boniface. His most recent works are Contes de fils et d’eaux, Sur une même écorce, Les lieux de l’amour/L’amour des lieux, and Voix.

I have agreed to be only a monster
To let you build stories
And associate them with my name
With my face

I have listened to your words
In order to understand them properly
To give them life as honestly as possible

I have become what you wanted to fear

That ignoble creature
It feels good to throw stones at

I have become that beast
So that you can avoid the mirrors
To let you embrace your egos

I have hugged your mutterings
The double-barreled words
And your inquiring looks
To allow you to sleep
So that there is always something worse in my direction

I have agree to be only your shadow
To be the ugliness that makes you pretty
To feebly parade among your lusts
So that your fingers can shine

I have run toward your demons
To make you believe in your gods

I have become the opposite
Of what I had been promised
So that you felt good
Giving me enough for a coffee

Translated by Howard Scott

Multidisciplinary artist Sébastien Bérubé hails from northwestern New Brunswick and graduated from the Edmunston campus of the University of Moncton. In 2012 he released a novel (L’œil de papier) and the following year recorded his album L’encre des saisons. His first collection of poems, Sous la boucane du moulin, was published by Les Éditions Perce-Neige in 2015.

Mid-afternoon
mid-January
mid-sky

a host of Starlings frolic
on a dull grey cloud-scape

the bird-ensemble
with wings unfurled
like black orchids in bloom

joyfully coast
back-and-forth
dance-on-air
in formation fashion
rings and hearts

over the inter-section
at Finch-and-Yonge
entertain a crowd of cars

I.B. (Bunny) Iskov is the Founder of The Ontario Poetry Society. Her work has been published in several literary journals and anthologies. She has three full collections and lots of chapbooks. In 2009, Bunny was the recipient of the inaugural R.A.V.E. Award - Recognizing Arts Vaughan Excellence, in recognition of outstanding contribution to the cultural landscape of the City of Vaughan. The award is for Art Educator / Mentor in the Literary Arts.

An early March morning and you arouse
to a shivering thermometer, whimpering to you
that outside your insulated walls the world,
drawn from darkness by the early-rising sun,
is silent and still at -34 Celsius and you are
prepared to resound your oft-repeated
and familiar theme: will this winter never end?

Even though your rational mind recognizes
the sun is so much higher in the sky, warmer now,
so strong that snow begins to melt
long before the temperature climbs above zero,
still, the intense longing for Spring seethes
inside you like unrequited love.

Two days later the mercury soars above zero
and the snow begins its wondrous mystery
of unmaking itself before your eyes, sighing
in on itself like sunken cheeks on the famished.
The hundred variant songs of water in the eaves
is an evocation that vibrates the urgent air,
setting messages astir in dormant aspens.

Glen Sorestad is a well known Saskatoon poet whose work has appeared in over 20 volumes of his poems, in over 60 anthologies and textbooks, in literary publications all over North America and in many other countries. His poetry has been translated into 7 languages to date.

Sorestad is a Member of the Order of Canada.

This is how it begins,
not with a word, but
with a single breath.

Something our bodies do, not
involuntarily, but without
the intervention of our wills.

Something our bodies do
to save us
from consciousness and death.

Still it is there—death—in that still

moment between inhalation

and exhalation, in the time between

the separate beatings of our separate hearts, in the infinitesimal time
our minds allow our bodies to be.

But, of course, it is our bodies that allow our minds to be,
for a brief time, and always, it is there
death like a bird that preys

upon another bird

in mid-flight.

one late September night i finally decided just to slip from Mom’s womb that’s how i was born because that afternoon Mom had laboured too much to be in labour she’d finished digging tout le grand champ de patates had bagged our supply for winter i was thin-skinned and skinny so skinny i was nicknamed manche à balai and i had this dread of rester stuck we lived in gumbo country and in rainy weather the rutted roads became impassable and before moving to that house on the edge of the village where there were no sidewalks and not even a streetlamp we’d had to live on the farm again for spring and summer and part of fall because after the seventh child we’d outgrown our tiny house on the other side of the tracks and when it rained for three days i saw fear build in Mom’s eyes when she looked out the window when Dad wasn’t coming back home with les commissions Mom just knew he’d stopped at the bar again and she’d busy herself try to hold it all together and she just didn’t know how long he would be and what she’d do if she ran out of formula for the baby or if one of ses p’tits got sick with a high fever and that’s when worry hung in the air like static electricity

There will be very little space despite the cold. I will stand at the source.
There will be footsteps of men. Very few beaches for new beginnings.

Very little in the way of shells and childhood.

There will be that woman. The page lines her with its foam.
There will be a few stars. On our lips, trees that crash down.

There will be a lot of words, your fall will drink from our memories.
And the icy imprint will kiss the empty dawn of our lives.

There will be very few of us. The silence will be a dream-covered house.
There will be few faces and books, too few bodies to love.

There will cliffs and remains.
There will be this nothing. This poem on my tongue that I will begin.
There will be the stone I will bring to my mouth.

In the arms of a rough sea, we will be alone.
Standing, close to the bark and the wind, like ink on snow,
legs tangled in seaweed, we will be born in silence.

Translated by Howard Scott

Marie-Belle Ouellet was born on the Gaspé Peninsula in 1978. At a very young age, she began reading and writing poetry. In 2004, she received the Arcade award for her collection of poems published under the title Nature morte. She was the first artist in residence at the Maison Félix- Leclerc in Vaudreuil in 2011, where she composed some of the poems that were published in her volume of poetry Je promets d’être là . Since 2006, she has published a number of volumes of poetry through Éditions David. Her most recent volume, Le son friable de l’étreinte , was just released.

The news is the same
Only nature explodes
The deserted park
Motionless
Not even a bird

Routine grows distant
Repeated acts
Quick movements
Time flies
Stop a little
To hear the trees
Discreet noises
Stunned by the town

Far off I see another city
That I don't know
Who is she?
Horizon or the next day

Green hands
Temper time
The mills seek abandonment
Blown by the wheat
On a glass wall
The seeds vanish in the heavy air
Cruel end
Long ago, I would have shouted
Now the silence of birds embraces me

I am in my belly
Nestled in a hollow
Sheltered from the rain
I watch the wind

The clouds drift
It's all so peaceful
But where are they going?
In search of time


translated by Howard Scott

Annick Proteau was born on April 24, 1970, in Québec City and grew up in Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier. At the age of 18, she moved to Québec City, where she is now raising her two daughters and pursuing a variety of endeavours. She has been employed as a health and social services aide at the CSSS de la Vieille Capitale for the past 11 years. Annick is always driving around the city for her work and when she has a moment, she writes poetry from her window on the world: her car.

The sun ventures
an approach along the curve of fruits
the morning inspects where it dips its feet
the blinds let in
the world in small doses
desires
(which have kept their composure)
reverberate deep in the bowls

the sky in its striving
burns the birds one by one
which drag it
like a sheet by the corners
seditions line the walls
memory organizes its mishmash of images
a day like any other
in which we record
the hours drained of any resilience

the street folds us into its basket
we eagerly seek
the miraculous morsels
in the hollows of our palms
small conservation of the species
will we ever finally meet up
blindly in the vastness?


translated by Howard Scott

Michel Létourneau was born in Quebec City in 1959. He has lived in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region for some ten years. He has to date published seven collections of poetry with various publishing houses. He explores themes such as childhood, hardships and the search for meaning.

With the last days of spring, my morning walk
over the Highlevel has become unsettling,
as bird carcasses now litter the roadside—
poor hapless tufts of feather and bone
that have washed into the rain-gutters,
the dark rinds of their flesh resinous,
like the catacombed holy men of Evora.

Then all at once an omen appears,
full of sudden dread, a portentous sign:
four wings beating together as one,
linked in horror like a forced coital act.
This sight was surely not meant for my eyes,
for those talon hooks have sunk deeply
into the soft crop of a shock-eyed pigeon
that flutters, spins, twists, and turns
as it is swept along the city-canyon walls
by the greater pulse of pinion and gear.

The peregrine’s scream comes so piercing
that it turns children at play to stone,
for its lone expressive syllable is honed
sharper than the gull-winged Stuka’s drop
over the war-torn ghettos of Warsaw.

This falcon then wings its way straight up
to the tall concrete of corporate tower
and high-rise urban condominium,
banking away from the abyss of erasure,
a survivor of our toxic alchemy.


Notes:

The Highlevel bridge in Edmonton crosses the North Saskatchewan river. The vertical drop from the walkway measures 164 feet.
There are currently 8 nesting pairs of peregrines in the city of Edmonton. In 1970 there was only a single nesting pair in the entire province.

D.S. Stymeist currently teaches poetics and aboriginal literature at Carleton University in Ottawa and has published poems in Prairie Fire, Steel Chisel, Ottawater, In/Words, and ByWords. His essays and reviews have appeared in journals such as Studies in English Literature, EIRC, R & R, Cahiers Elisabéthains, RQ, Mosaic, and Genre. He is the editor and founder of the micro-press, Textualis. He grew up in O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation (South Indian Lake, Manitoba) and is presently revising a collection of poetry entitled Dead Reckoning that explores the intersection of language, culture, and history.

Gone is the bitterness rounder the wine of promises
the irony of necessary reassurances slips by
his complaint whispered among the knots of yesterday
fugitive tomorrow hides from all longings
state of distraction in the incoherent succession
of paintings of wars that never stop abstracting

A whole list of imaginaries welded with burning
endless whispers
no impetus
no need to know
bodies barely begun
at the perfectly inaccessible edge of living

The autonomy of thought barely enough to thwart
the most committed plans to muddle flesh
in the name of evidence already formulated
by the erosion of breath absolutely

Plausible restructuring of time
through brief betrayals
imperfect legacy of repeated hesitation
the bare thought of his strictest frameworks
the most stubborn clichés

The disappointment of choice remains a dead-end to explore

Here is the child of the unbearable error of the heart
transparent his neck eroded by misunderstanding
white his destiny cut off from the rest
between air and shadow

So he had to be born on the threshold and voiceless
but will share new balances
expressions punctuated with accents of survival


translated by Howard Scott

Dominique Lauzon was born in Montreal in 1951. He has actively shared poetry through his work as writer, editor, proofreader and bookseller since the 1970’s. He also participates regularly in public readings. He is a member of the poetry magazine Exit. He is the author of nine anthologies, of which two have been translated to Spanish. Most recently at Écrits des Forges : Un livre une fois, published in 2006 and Lettre du Coeur et autres paysages in 2013.

I hear you coming from afar the air is full
and I opened them my ears my thoughts
leap like squirrels
chasing each other in the yard
blue-tinged in your eyes already
or greenish brownish shiny black
and on the balcony
I stacked chairs and table I saw
under a flight path
perhaps chance and my desire
will do things well will make you
jump from a plane
hanging like a smile on a face
on a damned beautiful parachute


translated by Howard Scott

Poet and novelist Martin Thibault has given writing workshops and published poetry and short story anthologies, novels and an essay on poetry (with philosopher Pierre Bertrand) with the publishing houses Le Noroît, Liber and Trois-Pistoles. His anthology Les yeux sur moi won the Jovette Bernier prize and was read in its entirety on CBC’s French-language radio network. His play Il poussera des ailes aux perchaudes was performed at La Chapelle Theatre. He is currently Montreal’s poet-in-residence.

If we had known it was going to be our last trip
we would have planned it exactly the same way.

Climbing the Spanish Steps in Rome
there was the macabre curiosity

to see how the universe settled on his cheeks
and lips in the poet’s final exhale.

Some things aren’t meant to be witnessed
by strangers -- even admirers.

When my soul begins to rattle its pineheavy limbs
it is your voice that will tease it out

your thumb and forefinger that will place coins
gently on my swollen eyelids.

Vivian Vavassis is a Montréal ex-pat who currently lives in Ottawa and calls both cities home. Her poems and essays have appeared in several issues of Arc, ottawater, PFYC, Montage, A Crystal Through Which Love Passes: Glosas for P.K. Page, and Studies in Canadian Literature, among others. Once upon a time, she co-founded and ran a little 'zine called incunabula.

if they only knew
the insistent call of mouthless voices

do they know
the so-slow ebb
of the waters of dream
and then the soul and its determination
to push back your boundless absence

do they only know
that I'm busy
holding back the last images
before an impatient wind
raises them and lets them fall
into the barbed wire of memory

it's barely the morning of your last shirt
it's barely the dawn of the first day without you

when the pain is consumed
I will return
to those places
where we went together
to gather the right breath
and a little wheat for the hungry

but little by little
I will regain my taste
for tree sap
and at daybreak
on the writing table

the pain will seem more distant
and my eye like a lamp
will add the right touch of heat

pleasure itself
will be in season
because I'll have drunk
from another world


Translation by Howard Scott

Nicole Gagné was born in Montreal, where she still resides. Between 2002 and 2006 she received several literary awards, including an honourable mention from the jury of the Prix Piché de Poésie (2002). Her poems have been published by Écrits des Forges in its anthology Poèmes du Lendemain. In 2006 her work appeared in the poetry anthology Sunday Nights Blues et autres brumes published by Éditions du Vermillon. She has also published poems in various magazines, as well as haikus in magazines and anthologies. Ms. Gagné is a member of UNEQ.

In front of a worn brick house
you choke the darknesses come from childhood
what you seek lies instead in the light
the smell of fresh bread hanging on memory
you came this far to track down the racket
to under the planks of a rotten veranda
close   so close
a child with eyes closed
hid his dreams under pajamas
between the lost tooth and a bird feather
close   so close
you open your mouth to grind the shadows
that persistence you had
in polishing bleakness like an ancient jewel


images of childhood slip through your fingers
you want to recall your street
narrow corridor clogged with doubts
the end of the street Mom is it the end of the world?
patches of sky sewn to roofs
with strips of sheet metal
the noise of the wind in the sheds
the consent of the morning
to gather pieces of light
the taste of July in the belly of strawberries
clotheslines filled with memories of the body


you can burn the rest
appeal once again
to the simplest beauty in the world


Translation by Howard Scott

Lyne Richard was born in Quebec City and spends most of her time creating literary and visual works. She has published nine books of poetry, two novels, Le bruit des oranges and Ne dites pas à ma mere que je suis vivant, with Québec Amérique, two short-story collections, Il est venu avec des anemones and Hurler sans trop faire de bruit, with QA, as well as a young adult novel, La nuit Woolf, again with QA.

Perfect feast
I expect nothing of colours
and yet

I expect nothing
patience under my arm
like an immortal loaf


This calm beast
at the table of futures
demimonde in preparation

even the clouds
their faces over the bay
packed space


Nothing lacking
the tea stays hot
like a lasting full moon
and the time to drink
painless

all the sand yesterday
left in my shoes

there is no beginning or end
my ocean back


It stays there
the sea
its surf

the white
the blue

we don't know which eternity to choose


I walk along spring
its shores
no reason for their dizziness

never the same sun
just a sketch of sky
under a pile of dead leaves


Gift
fog
lots of space between the sounds

your absence
simple clarity
without landscape


Translation by Howard Scott

Joanne Morency lives in the Gaspé region. Her fifth book, Ce bruit de disparition (Triptyque), was published in February 2014. Her first book, Miettes de moi (Triptyque 2009), won the Fondation d’entreprise L-A Finances award for best first poetry collection in Paris and the Jovette-Bernier–Ville de Rimouski award. A former psychologist, Joanne Morency is also interested in poetry as a vector of discovery and well-being, and she teaches writing workshops to that end.

I live in the heart of a lost country
yet one I've never left
I was born here I'll die here
a country that is no more
but follows me everywhere
I'd like to get out
which I couldn't do
they'd like to drive me out
which they couldn't do
sometimes it's so small
that despite its great river and its lakes
it's no bigger than a teardrop
and sometimes so huge
it goes on forever
I took possession of it at birth
proud discoverer out of my mother's womb
like a caravel
come from far beyond La Rochelle
a country like the one
I built in my childhood
on Lake Saint Pierre
among the cattails and reeds
I put down my roots
in the soil of legends
so that the tree of my life
draws the sap of poetry there
a country of summers where fire my friend
comes down from the zenith to swim with me
a country of autumns where my inner forests
sang flames of all colors
a northern country with frosty eyes
ice storm suns burning on snow
a country where big flakes of snow geese
melted into the pure air of spring
in my country we're so crazy for beauty
that meadow flowers turn into swallows
and fly off on feathers of blue fragrance
so crazy with music
the icicles on the eves
sound like a glass keyboard
under little mallets of cold
so crazy with magic
that we see trees in January
turn into great snowy owls
under their down of frost
so crazy for love
that we stroke the skin of days
and every river is a naked woman
smiling on a bed of light
no one dies in my country
at every family gathering
some of my most distant ancestors
even those from 1663
from St-François du Havre de Grâce
turn up with their instruments
and start dancing
if it happens one day
I lose my lost country
I'll become like the haggard homeless man
who on winter nights
at the end of a blind alley
among trash and garbage cans
makes his only home
a dirty cardboard box



Translation by Howard Scott

Pierre Chatillon is a writer and classical composer. He has published some forty books, including La mort rousse (published in English as Wild Red Love), L’homme aurore, L’enfance est une île and Le château de sable. He has recorded four albums: Air pour Claire, Les oiseaux, Le soleil and La victoire. In 1998, he created the literary park L’arbre de mots in Nicolet, Quebec.

• www.pierrechatillon.com