Gaston Miron

Miron, Gaston
Gaston Miron, poet, publisher (b at Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, Qué 8 Jan 1928). Miron spent the period 1947-53 discovering through everyday events the values of his province - its landscapes, people, heritage, social conditions and politics. In 1953 he and a few friends founded the Montréal publishing house L'Hexagone, and he continued his explorations of contemporary society. His poetry, for a long time oral, has been published in L'Homme rapaillé (1970) and Contrepointes (1975) and has captured an international audience. His poems are rooted in the here and now, but they remain faithful to Québec's ancestral language, customs and usages, crystallizing isolated images: the man we meet on the street and whom we find in ourselves; the man committed to a political struggle; the collective and social individual caught up in a common destiny; and the land. Through these themes, his writing exalts and reconciles opposing elements in a time frame that is repetitive but that tends towards an ultimate transcendence. The poetry is dense and measured.

Miron was the first poet to show the Quebecker as he is. He had a definite influence on poetry of the 1960s and 1970s and he awakened the North American and European reader to a particular and universal anthropological reality.

His concern for writing in Québec is expressed by his involvement, with Lise Gauvin, in Écrivains contemporains du Québec: depuis 1950 (1989) and Écrivains contemporains du Québec: anthologie (1998). À bout portant: correspondence de Gaston Miron à Claude Haeffely, 1954-1965 (1989) is an important chronicle of a formative period in Québécois literature. Miron has also been translated into English: The Agonized Life: Poems and Prose (1980) and The March to Love: Selected Poems (1986).

Author EUGENE ROBERTO