The Elements

The new collection from Governor Generals Literary Awardwinning poet and translator Ern Moure is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destruction. The Elements is a family book, a thinkers biography in poetry, and a polylingual homage. Poems about and for Moures late father accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking world and self in a struggle against invasive powers are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. By celebrating our ability to think and to revolt, it defends the human pull toward happiness and sovereignty, toward life, toward living. The infinitely transmissible, it says, demands this polyvalent body.