Poetry
The March to Love
L'Homme rapaillé
Gaston Miron · 1970
Synopsis
The volume at last brings together poems and texts hitherto scattered in small collections and publications that cannot be found: pieces from Deux sangs, fragments of great cycles and shorter cycles, L'Amour et le militant, Poèmes de l'amour en sursis. La marche à l'amour, a suite of seven poems, speaks of a missed love; La batèche, in which the damned Canuck is voiced, takes its rhythm from popular oaths; La vie agonique comprises twelve poems on a suffering country. Prose pieces, including notes on the non-poem and the poem, speak of the alienated language.
Context
Long reluctant to collect his poems, the author received the prize of the journal Études françaises in April 1970, and the volume appeared the same year from the Presses de l'Université de Montréal, in the series of that prize. Soon afterwards, during the October Crisis, he was thrown into prison. The text has never ceased to be revised: seven editions up to the definitive Gallimard edition, introduced by Marie-Andrée Beaudet, with a preface by Édouard Glissant.
Who it is for
A collection of uneven accessibility: the love poems can be read on their own, while the political texts assume knowledge of the Quebec before the Quiet Revolution and of the language question.
Prizes and reception
Prix Québec-Paris in 1970, Grand Prix littéraire de la Ville de Montréal in 1971, Prix Guillaume-Apollinaire in 1981; more than one hundred thousand copies sold.
Sources for this page 9
The pages consulted to check this page.