Gérald Godin | Evenings at Loose Ends | Gazelle Books

Evenings at Loose Ends

Author: Gérald Godin. Translated by Judith Cowan | ISBN: 1550650157 : 9781550650150 | Format: Paperback | Size: 155x230mm | Pages: 112 | Weight: .148 Kg. | Published: IPG (Véhicule Press) – January 1991 | Availability: In Print | Subjects: Poetry texts & anthologies

When he was alive

Gérald Godin embraced poetry and politics with great passion and appetite. Godin was a journalist, a Parti Québecois cabinet minister, and first and foremost, a poet. This is the first of his seven books of poetry to appear in English.

“He writes with enviable directness and simplicity, yet achieves surreal scope.” – Ottawa Citizen

Gérald Godin

(1938-94). Canadian poet and politician who was one of the founders of the literary journal Parti pris. He vigorously practises the use of joual in his own poetry, especially Les Cantouques (1967), as advocated by the review, but in his case without any pejorative intention or effect. He has a natural delight in popular speech of all kinds, and has developed his own inventive mixture of joual and other registers of Quebec French to produce a rich, accessible poetry of frequently infectious musicality. His work expresses social anger and compassion, but also love and tenderness. Poems up to 1986 are collected in Ils ne demandaient qu’à brûler (1987). He was elected to the Quebec National Assembly in 1976 as a member of the nationalist Parti Québécois and occupied several ministerial posts in successive Quebec governments.

Gérald Godin (November 13 1938 – October 12 1994) was a Quebec poet and politician. Born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, he worked as a journalist at La Presse and other newspapers and magazines. He was among those arrested under the War Measures Act during the October Crisis in 1970. Comments Godin made later in life, however, suggested that he supported terrorism. In 1988 on the joint Public Broadcasting Service/National Film Board production Canada: True North Mr. Godin is filmed saying: “Only bombs, in fact, were the ideal communication process to convince the English that we were after something important.”

In the 1976 Quebec provincial election, he won a seat as a candidate for the Parti Québécois, defeating incumbent Premier of Quebec Robert Bourassa in his own riding of Mercier. He served in various cabinet posts in the governments of René Lévesque and Pierre-Marc Johnson. His life companion was the Québécois singer Pauline Julien. As a poet, he won the Québec-Paris prize for his 1987 work Ils ne demandaient qu’à brûler. source

Judith Cowan

was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and grew up in Toronto. She studied modern languages at the University of Toronto and graduated in English and French literature. After a couple of M. A.’s, from U. of T. and York University, she completed a PhD in Canadian comparative literature at l’Université de Sherbrooke and went from there to teaching at l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières.

Her first story collection, More Than Life Itself, appeared in 1997, and in French translation as Plus que la vie même in 1999. The second collection, Gambler’s Fallacy, came out in 2001, followed by its French translation, La loi des grands nombres in 2003. In 2004 she won the Governor General’s Award for Translation with Mirabel, her English translation of Pierre Nepveu’s prize-winning poetry collection, Lignes aériennes.

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