All Is Flesh collects in one volume Hugh Hazelton’s English translations of Yannick Renaud’s brilliant first two books of poems, Taxidermy and The Disappearance of Ideas, first published by Éditions Les Herbes rouges in Montreal.

Taxidermy is a discourse on time consisting of prose poems stretched to the very limits of detachment. A completely objectified couple, alternately speaking as simply “he” or “she,” strive to attain perfect control over their physical movements. Slowing them down, even stopping them, is equivalent in their minds to seizing and savouring the essence of the present and, by extension, to stopping time in their lives—an enactment of the romantic aesthetics of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Their attempts at “holding the pose,” as much for themselves as for each other, generate a tension in their voices—at once demanding, yearning and confessional—between the need for both static form and fluid movement in the choreography of their lives, which seeks to “occupy space unequivocally.”

The Disappearance of Ideas is a meditation on time that interrogates death and mourning, reminding us that “death remains the privilege of the living” and that “cathedrals tell us nothing more than the time on their stones.” Unsentimental and intellectualized, the poems generate their radiant intensity by drawing our attention to the part of mourning that remains unresolved and inaccessible in our memories, reminding us of “what we don’t know of stories.” But this absence, what remains unknown of the past to us, also haunts our futures, where “actions taken only hinder what should have been,” and “there is no second chance.” As Baudrillard has said: “Things live only on the basis of their disappearance, and, if one wishes to interpret them with entire lucidity, one must do so as a function of their disappearance.”

Yannick Renaud works in Montreal for Les éditions Les Herbes rouges. He is also administrative director of the poetry review Estuaire and has long been active in the production of literary events in Quebec.

Hugh Hazelton is a writer and translator who specializes in poetry from Quebec and Latin America. His translation of Vétiver, by Joël Des Rosiers, won the Governor General’s award for French-English translation in 2006. He teaches spanish translation and Latin American civilization at Concordia University in Montreal.

Yannick Renaud's profile page

Hugh Hazelton is a Montreal writer and translator who specializes in the comparison of Canadian and Quebec literatures with those of Latin America. He has written four books of poetry and translates from Spanish, French and Portuguese into English; his translation of Vétiver, a book of poems by Joël Des Rosiers, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-English translation in 2006. He is a professor emeritus of Spanish at Concordia University in Montreal and former co-director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. In 2016 he won the Linda Gaboriau Award for his work on behalf of literary translation in Canada.

Hugh Hazelton's profile page

“Renaud’s poems are untitled and structured sentence-like on the page, simultaneously defying canonical form and reflecting the poet’s thematic interest in testing the limits of bodily constraints. The fragmentary style of the prose poems allows for ontological exploration. Hazelton’s translation reads with radiant and imaginative originality, and provides an instance of aesthetic transformation even as it offers images both inspiring and dark.”
– Quill & Quire

"Using a fragmented style, redolent of missed steps, twisting legs and brutal breaks, the poet never makes concessions to simplicity. Taxidermy is demanding poetry, written in prose, without indulging in the facile lyricism that might seem virtually impossible to avoid."
– Le Devoir

"The Disappearance of Ideas, a meditation on mourning, has a great and beautiful placidity … Renaud’s poetic phrasing is finely chiselled, down to the ellipses which give rise to the book’s most powerful thoughts, without ever falling into the trap of sentimentality."
– Voix et images