Meridian Line

For the last twenty years, Paul Bélanger’s poetry has been acclaimed for its emotionally charged vocabulary and philosophical elegance. In Meridian Line, the Québécois poet gives us a cartographer’s log of an inner landscape. Bélanger’s poems blend a deeply personal voice with fluid, open-ended lines that track the movement of consciousness against the backdrop of an elemental world: “a dirt road / lost on a swath of grey sky.” The result, thanks to Judith Cowan’s brilliant translation, is meditative, mysterious, and startling.