Patricia Keeney, a long-time professor of creative writing at York University, has had her fourth bilingual volume of poetry published in France. The author of 10 books of poetry in English, this is Keeney’s eighth volume in another language. Keeney has also taught English and humanities at York for some 40 years.
Selected and translated by Michelle DuClos and Magdelaine Gibson, the new volume is called Approche de la Déesse, a title taken from Keeney’s poem “A Touch of the Goddess” and contains poems “inspired largely by my love of Greece and partly by the throb of mythology,” says Kenney. The volume was published by Alidades in Bergerac.
“As a writer, poetry has always been my first love,” says Keeney, “so I am especially delighted when my poems find a life in other languages. The translation of this new volume is tremendously sensitive to both the original English and to the French. These are two fine translators whom I first met while teaching at the University of Bordeaux some years ago.”
Three other volumes of Keeney’s work have been previously translated by DuClos and published by Les Amis de la Poésie in Bergerac. All four of the French editions are bilingual –with the original English on one page and the French facing it – making the volume especially useful for language and translation classes.