This Radiant Life

Translated by Erín Moure

Bookhug Press; translation of La vie radieuse*, by Chantal Neveu

“Moure has crafted a spectacular English poem in conversation with the French—a work channelling science, art, revolution and corporeal movement balanced in stillness and space. It is a thrilling space where meanings are amplified, beauty reverberates and the reader’s expectations are exceeded again and again. Moure advances new possibilities for both Neveu’s poem and translation itself.”

—Peer assessment committee: Jonathan Kaplansky, Aimee Wall and Anne-Marie Wheeler

Synopsis

In this stunning long poem, Chantal Neveu draws from the lexicons of science, art, revolution, and corporeal movement to forge intense and extended rhythms that invoke the elements and spaces making up our world. This is poetry capable of holding life and death, solidarity, and love. Renewal. Breathing.

In its brevity and persistence, This Radiant Life, translated by Erín Moure, is a material call for action: it asks us to let go, even just a little bit, of our individuality in favour of mutuality, to arrive separately yet in unison at a radiance in which all living beings can thrive.

Biography

Erín Moure is a poet and translator who has published over forty books, including poetry, essays, memoir and translations and co-translations from French, Spanish, Galician, Portuguese, Portunhol and Ukrainian. Recent translations include The Uplands: Book of the Courel, by Uxío Novoneyra, Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism, by Juan Gelman, and The Face of the Quartzes, by Chus Pato. Moure holds two honorary doctorates from universities in Canada and Spain and was a 2017 Creative Fellow at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. She was also the 2019 International Translator in Residence at Queen’s College, University of Oxford. Erín Moure lives in Montréal, Quebec.

Photo: Karis Shearer