Mirabel

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 sadnesses 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. Judith Cowan’s translation won the Governor General’s Award for Translation in 2004.