The poetry of Yves Préfontaine, perhaps unmatched in Quebec literature for its vociferous and flamboyant rhetoric, cries out the anguish of a visionary protesting the absence of a home. Like many writers of 1960s Quebec, Préfontaine quests after a language, a literature, and a place of his own. His poetry is notable for the intensity it brings to that quest, which begins in self-examination and ends in politics. In Préfontaine, as in other Quebecois literary revolutionaries of that decade, may be read an ironic conjunction suggestive of French Romanticism: the dark metaphysics of solitude and the void sustaining the optimistic politics of nationalism.

A native of Montreal, Préfontaine came to the vocation of poet early. Much of his published poetry was composed before the end of adolescence. Following graduate studies in anthropology at the Université de Montréal...