The new collection from Governor General's Literary Award-winning poet
and translator Erín Moure is a book about tenderness, and about The
Good, in the face of destruction.
The Elements is a family book, a thinker's biography in poetry, and a
polylingual homage. Poems about and for Moure's 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."