Poetry, Rare and Signed

Anne Hébert: Selected Poems

Hardcover copies available in limited quantity

This is a first edition, first printing available in limited supply. Books have been archived at BOA Editions, Ltd. since publication and are in good condition. Hardcover. Ideal for collectors.

Translated by A. Poulin, Jr.

Anne Hébert: Selected Poems is the first bilingual collection of poetry by this major world poet—and Canada’s most important French poet of the twentieth century—to be published in the United States and Canada. It includes a generous selection from Hébert’s central book, Poemes (Paris, 1960) and several previously uncollected and untranslated poems. A. Poulin, Jr. is the highly acclaimed poet and translator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s French and German poetry.

“Minor Despair”

The river’s reclaimed the islands I loved
The keys of silence are lost
The hollyhock’s not as sweet as I thought
The water has more secrets than it sings

My heart collapses
The moment no longer supports it.

Praise for the collection

“Anne Hébert was one of the first modern poets that I read—in any language—and her work made an indelible impression on me. I still know some of her poems virtually by heart—they both capture and create their own world.” —Margaret Atwood

“There is a persistent grandeur in Anne Hébert’s writing that is startling in our time and in the current literary context in English. Both the tradition and iconoclasm in the work of this French poet of North America invite us to listen to something beyond our own conventions.” —W.S. Merwin

FormatHardcover

Publication DateAugust 1, 1988

ISBN0-918526-56-6

$25.00

About the Author

A. Poulin, Jr.

Poet, translator, and editor A. Poulin, Jr. (1938–1996) was the founding publisher and president of BOA Editions, Ltd. His distinguished poetry translations include Rainier Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus and The Complete French Poems as well as Anne Hébert's Selected Poems and Day Has No Equal But Night. Poulin's own collections include In Advent, The Widow's Taboo: Poems After the Catawba, A Nest of Sonnets, A Momentary Order, and Cave Dwellers. He also co-edited several editions of the celebrated anthology Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin).

For his poetry and translations, Poulin received both a creative writing fellowship and a translator's grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He also received a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and two translation awards from Columbia University's Translation Center. In 1971, Poulin joined the faculty at the The College at Brockport, State University of New York, where he was Professor of English. He was awarded an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters by the University of New England.

In 1976, Poulin founded BOA Editions as an independent, not-for-profit press devoted to publishing work by contemporary international and American authors. A mentor to numerous poets and scholars, Poulin died in 1996.

Anne Hébert

Anne Hébert was a Canadian author and poet. She won Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, three times, twice for fiction and once for poetry. Her work has been translated into seven languages and her novels are recognized as masterpieces of contemporary French fiction. She worked for Radio Canada and the National Film Board of Canada, and in 1960 was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Hébert died in 2000.