![]() ![]() “A Cowhide Mitten Made in China” recounts the burial of a pet bird inside the titular mitten and wonders at the keen freshness of grief from decades’ remove: Character sketches such as “Cousin Jerome,” “For Monnie,” “A Soldier’s End on de L’Épée Street,” and “The Art of Departure” are almost devotional in their tenderness. ![]() Plourde’s poems are narratives of memory, snapshots, heavy with the weight of time. “How strange our present / and past coexist / and never merge,” Marc Plourde writes in Borrowed Days. These short, unelaborated lines recall the vastness of the tundra and create a similarly unadorned space of contemplation, one that evokes a longing for a home, where self is found in relationship with others. The process is not one of translation so much as adaptation, moving the text not only between languages, but across space and time, between cultural contexts. “I must be absent / From the teaching of what I am,” she laments, remembering returning to school after a visit home, but then celebrates that “Today is today … I am myself once more / In laughter.”īacon has said that she writes her poems first in Innu, then rewrites them in French. Many are odes to the tundra itself:Ī Tea in the Tundra / Nipishapui Nete Mushuat Joséphine Bacon Translated by Donald WinklerīookLand Press $16.95 paper 96pp 9781772310351Others kaleidoscope between city and wilderness, subtly tracing the lines of Bacon’s own biography. The poems are rooted in the concrete worlds of nature and the body, but evoke the presence of a larger, living spirit. It is now available as A Tea in the Tundra / Nipishapui Nete Mushuat, a bilingual volume that maintains Bacon’s Innu alongside Montreal translator Donald Winkler’s interpretation of the French text. This ongoing process of rupture and repair has had an enduring influence on her work as an internationally recognized poet and storyteller.īacon’s 2014 collection of poems in French and Innu, Un thé dans la toundra / Nipishapui Nete Mushuat, was a finalist for that year’s Governor General’s Literary Award as well as Montreal’s Grand Prix du livre. Working directly with elders made it possible for her to re-establish a connection to her culture and the land. She went on to work as an interpreter for an anthropologist doing research in Innu communities. Like many Indigenous people of her generation, Joséphine Bacon attended a residential school for most of her childhood, isolated from her Innu family and the seasonal rhythms of their culture. ![]()
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