The original version, Seul on est, won the 2007 Governor
General’s Literary Award for Poetry in French. Now English readers get
to experience this excellent work with One, thanks to a
translation by Jo-Anne Elder. Thibodeau searches for “the exquisite,” a
life of awareness where the beauty, good, belonging and love that the
world has to offer is known, revealed. This poet closely observes and
details locales and interactions, communicating his thought with
brevity and force, while constantly evoking the fascination and
physical charge experienced from being in familiar places (the tidal
flats of New Brunswick, alongside the Petitcodiac River and its tidal
bore, or “mascaret,” an Acadian term used in this edition) and faraway
(the terrain in and around European cities, Asia and the Middle East).
Thibodeau draws from all these places an “inexhaustible geography, a
single being.” Though his voice verges on the ecstatic, he doesn’t gush
for global sameness; one is connected to others but is still different.
There are places to go, but there is always home to return to. In a nod
to the author’s home province and “mascaret,” each poem is placed on
the page in two crosscurrents, with the top four lines running
wider and across the page and a second segment with six narrower lines.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2009.