Climates

Herménégilde Chiasson is one of Canada's most versatile artists -- a photographer and printmaker, a playwright, a filmmaker, and a painter, illustrator, and set designer. Above all, though, he is a poet. The French edition of Climats, published in 1996, was short-listed for a Governor General's Award. Chiasson's eighth book of poetry, it is the first to be translated into English. The poems in Climates are suffused with the desire to fully inhabit, and be inhabited by, a place: Acadie. The political push-and-pull of being Acadian is a constant, even amid personal upheavals. Boundaries between poetry and prose dissolve and reappear like the boundaries between thought and dream, creating a double consciousness that is particularly Acadian.