For the last twenty years, Paul Bélanger's poetry has been acclaimed for its emotionally charged vocabulary and philosophical elegance. In Meridian Line, the Québécois poet gives us a cartographer's log of an inner landscape. Bélanger's poems blend a deeply personal voice with fluid, open-ended lines that track the movement of consciousness against the backdrop of an elemental world: "a dirt road / lost on a swath of grey sky." The result, thanks to Judith Cowan's brilliant translation, is meditative, mysterious, and startling.

Paul Belanger, poet and editor, has been nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry on three occasions, most recently for the French edition of Meridian Line (Origine des méridiens). He teaches creative writing at the University of Quebec and is the publisher of les Éditions du Noroît.
He lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Paul Belanger's profile page

Judith Cowan was born in Nova Scotia, but grew up in Toronto. She graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures. She received an M. A. in French literature from the University of Toronto, followed by an M. A. in English literature from York University. She received a Ph. D. in Canadian Comparative Literature from L’Université de Sherbrooke, Québec, and went on to teach literature in English at L’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivères until the end of the twentieth century.Her stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines, including Quarry Magazine, Queen’s Quarterly, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and The Antigonish Review. In French translation, they have also been published in Liberté, XYZ : la revue de la nouvelle, and L’Atelier du Roman (Paris). She was one of the original contributors to Ellipse magazine, where she has published English translations of individual poems by many Québec poets. She is the only English-language writer in Trois-Rivières, Québec.

Judith Cowan's profile page