Toronto Book Awards 2002 short list:
Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person
by Eirin Moure
Published by House of Anansi Press Limited
This biographical information and excerpt is posted courtesy of House of Anansi Press Limited.
Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person
A Translation
An ecstatic long poem of hope and creeks and cats and rain, Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person catches Eirin Moure at her most playful and ingenuous. And wearing her Galician name . . . A temporary move to Toronto last winter, a twisted ankle, an empty house - all inspired Moure as she read Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa's classic long poem O Guardador de Rebanhos. For fun, she started to translate, altering tones and vocabularies. From the Portuguese countryside and roaming sheep of 1914, a 21st-century Toronto emerged, its neighbourhoods still echoing the 1950s, their dips and hollows, hordes of wild cats, paved creeks.
Eirin Moure
Eirin Moure lives in Montréal, where she is also known as Erin Moure. One of Canada's most respected poets, Moure has published ten books of poetry, including A Frame of the Book (or The Frame of a Book), which was co-published in the U.S. by Sun and Moon Press. Her work has received the Governor General's Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and she has translated the work of Québec poets Nicole Brossard and Cynthia Girard (with Robert Majzels), French poets Sébastien Smirou and Christophe Tarkos, and the Chilean poet Andrés Ajens.
Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person - excerpt
"James, partner in salvation:
That bloody sun's shining everywhere, even in downtown Toronto ...
That bloody sun's shining all over, even on Bay Street,
It's enough to make liberal humanism look good,
Because everyone suddenly looks up from their day, seeing sun as I do
And in that pure moment
Shine on me, little star, they croon
regressing tearfully
and sighing as if they'd fooled themselves
into feeling like the true and primitive Human Being
who saw the Earth's star rise without bowing to adore it.
But hey it's so natural -- more natural
Than what they do all day south of Davenport
where the streets are all called Bay Street, at least ten of them and
maybe more,
Bay Street Bay Street Bay Street,
Paved with gold and God,
and art and hotdog stands and morals . . ."
