Annick Perrot-Bishop

In Long, Secret Rivers is a delightful and inspiring evocation of the imagination, a passage into the inner life of poetry that is refreshing and renewing. It both startles and seduces by the richness of its luxurious language. Enchanting, haunting, these rivers mingle water and blood, and teem with voices that murmur and sing of nature, love, death, rebirth, inner probings of the soul, the sensual discovery of others and a quest for all-embracing meaning. The waters of In Long, Secret Rivers express both vehemence and serenity as they meld the minuscule and the cosmic, water and air, exulting in the mysteries, pains and joys of flesh, spirit, life, light and hope. These exquisitely nuanced, compelling poems awaken the senses with lush layering of sensuous detail and mythic resonance. The writing is sure, lyrical, contemplative like the very best of the solar eloquence of Valéry or the meditative intensity of Saint-John Perse. In Long, Secret Rivers articulates the deepest impulses of our humanity to praise and reverence, and invites us to flow towards the sacred. In Long, Secret Rivers is an outstanding work of art, as close to Mallarmé’s ideal of pure poetry as it is possible to write in the modern world.

“En longues rivières cachées offers poems of admirable concision and powerful nature imagery [expressing] a sumptuous, unique inner universe well-served by exceptionally masterful writing.… I was astonished… I would not have believed such poetry possible. It consoles me for being unable to read Lucretius or Virgil in the original Latin.… Perrot-Bishop’s poetry is a lover’s dialogue with the planet in the rich fullness of its female essence.”
Translated from Réjean Beaudoin, “En état d’incandescence”, Canadian Literature

Annick Perrot-Bishop is a Francophone Canadian author of multicultural background (Vietnamese, Indian and French). A resident of St. John’s, Newfoundland, she has published some sixty short stories and translations in literary journals and anthologies as well as five books. Her highly-acclaimed poetry collection Femme au profil d’arbre (Éditions David) was published by Ekstasis Editions in Neil Bishop’s English translation as Woman Arborescent (2005). In Long, Secret Rivers is Neil Bishop’s translation of Annick Perrot-Bishop’s En longues rivières cachées (Eds. David), a translation for which he won First Prize in the prestigious John Dryden Translation Competition (2008), organized by the British Comparative Literature Association and the British Centre for Literary Translation.