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Poetry Canadian

Just like her

translated by Erin Moure

by (author) Louise Dupré

Publisher
Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd.
Initial publish date
Jun 2011
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781894987561
    Publish Date
    Jun 2011
    List Price
    $17.00

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Description

Just Like Her (Tout comme elle, in French) is a searing and daring work of poetry, written for the theatre, about the inevitability of loss and the enduring nature of love. In four acts Dupré explores the difficult, painful, yet necessary separation of daughter and mother. In each act, we hear the voice of a daughter speak: of the relationship with the mother, of feeling unloved in her differences from the mother, of giving birth herself to a daughter, and of observing her own teenage daughter, who is ... just like her. The poems are followed by a conversation between Louise Dupré and acclaimed Quebec theatre director Brigitte Haentjens about writing, women, theatre and life. In June 2011, Brigitte Haentjens will be directing the English-language premiere of the play Tout Comme Elle at Luminato the Toronto Festival of Arts + Creativity.

About the authors

A central figure in contemporary poetry and one of the most iconoclastic figures in Galician and European literature, Chus Pato's sixth book, m-Tala, broke the poetic mould in 2000. Hordes of Writing, the third text in her projected pentology Method, received the 2008 Spanish Critics' Prize for Galician Poetry, and the Losada Di?guez literary prize in 2009. Pato continues to refashion the way we think of the possibilities of poetic text, of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. She brings us face to face with the traumas and migrations of Europe, with writing itself, and the possibility (or not) of poetry accounting for our animal selves. Secession is Pato's ninth book and her fourth to be translated into English.

Montreal poet Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry in English and Galician/English, and thirteen volumes of poetry translated from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese into English, by poets such as Andr's Ajens, Nicole Brossard, Rosala de Castro, Louise Dupr?, and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. Moure is currently revising the bilingual French/English impossible play Kapusta, a sequel to The Unmemntioable, for publication in 2015, and is translating Chus Pato's Carne de Leviatan into English as Flesh of Leviathan, to appear in 2016. She is also working on a new book of poems called The Elements, and on a translation of Wilson Bueno's Mar Paraguayo.

Erin Moure's profile page

Louise Dupre is the author of numerous books and was twice nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. Her novel La Memoria (1996) won two major literary prizes. La Voie lactee (The Milky Way), her most recent book, was nominated for the 2001 Prix France-Quebec. Louise Dupre teaches literature and creative writing at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal.

Liedewy Hawke's translation Hopes and Dreams: The Diary of Henriette Dessaulles, 1874-1881 won the 1986 Canada Council Prize for Translation (now the Governor General's Award for Translation). Her other translations include Memoria (Louise Dupre's La memoria), published by Simon & Pierre in 1999, and House of Sighs, a translation of Jocelyne Saucier's La vie comme une image, published by Mercury Press in 2001.

Louise Dupré's profile page

Editorial Reviews

"The wideness of Dupré's work comes from the space left between vignettes, the breadth of the leap between moments, which takes on an emotional as opposed to a sequential logic, and which allows the reader to consider her own experience." - The Fiddlehead

"Wry, startling, and brutally honest by turns, Dupré...capture[s] adroitly the myriad complexities, tensions, and contradictions in the construction of femininity." - Canadian Literature

"Observational and acute, Dupré struggles with deep wounds, the scars of childhood and a loss of love. The relationship between a mother and daughter is rife with raw emotions — anger, hatred, love, pain. It's both a reflection and a reflector." - Telegraph-Journal