Day Has No Equal But Night

Though the Quebecois Anne Hebert is a distinguished contemporary novelist and poet in French, her work is little-known and hard to get hold of in the U.S. Poulin's substantial selection of her writing, translated with facing original, is thus a real boon to American readers. The selection includes work from Hebert's two major collections of poems, The Tomb of Kings (1952) and Miracle of the Word (1960), as well as previously uncollected poems and a curious concluding essay by Poulin about the problems he himself has had as a Quebecois-American. The poetry from The Tomb of Kings , written mostly in short lines, is at once austere, riddling and grand. These are poems of painful solitude aspiring to a condition of ``original silence and poverty,'' and the insistent difficulties they present to a reader demonstrate their commitment to poetry as an ordeal of purification: ``anything easy is a snare.'' By contrast, the work from Miracle of the Word , composed mostly in short prose paragraphs, is expansive--rich in vocabulary, ecstatic and imperative in tone--and reminiscent of Rimbaud and Char. Hebert's writing, like most modern French poetry, is rhetorical in a way that contemporary English and American poetry tend not to be: that can make translation difficult. But we can only be grateful to Poulin for making Hebert available in the original, as well as in his serviceable translation. (Apr.)