For as Far as the Eye Can See is Judith Cowan’s translation of Quebec poet and journalist Robert Melançon’s 2004 collection, Les paradis des apparences. The book comprises 144 numbered poems, each consisting of four tercets describing a predominantly urban North American landscape. Melançon alludes to this consistency in form in poem 36, when he writes, “It all has to fit into twelve lines – a lesser sonnet,” and indeed these poems share the tendency of the more familiar 14-line form toward a lyric unity of voice and tight closure. 

Each poem stands on its own, but the collection’s strength emerges as the sequence develops: the poems begin to refer back to and anticipate each other, and we get a clearer sense of the urban space the narrating voice describes. Although that voice asserts, late in the sequence, that “the noises of traffic will not let us behold / in this stretch of municipal grass the locus amoenus / of The Bucolics,” these poems are best read as (urban) pastoral lyrics. 

As the title suggests, Melançon’s focus privileges the visual, and the poet deftly shifts our attention among the minutiae of both public and domestic spaces. The poems ekphrastically compare the scenes they describe, as well as their own rhetoric, with other art forms, including photography, music, and especially oil painting (the names Seurat, Poussin, Breughel, Dürer, O’Keeffe, Caravaggio, Turner, and Miró all appear). Cowan’s translations are subtle, leaving little trace of awkward or clumsy syntax, which is commendable when dealing with a poet who makes such extensive use of paradox, enjambment, and catechresis. 

The collection’s surface accessibility and consistency of form set it apart from the more fragmented, deliberately opaque work of a number of contemporary poets. For as Far as the Eye Can See offers a beautiful, meditative comment on our not entirely new millennium.