Although she is widely regarded in Canada as one of her country's greatest twentieth-century writers, Hébert has received very little critical attention in the United States or elsewhere. There are many reasons for this. First, most of her poems were published in French. Even though some have been translated into English, they were not widely available until the late 1990s, when collections such as Day Has No Equal But Night: Poems were published. Also, as Lorraine Weir notes in her entry on Hébert for Dictionary of Literary Biography, Hébert's "refusal to be bound by the concerns of the moment," instead writing a collection of diverse, experimental works, "constitutes a challenge which has not yet been fully taken up by Quebec critics and a work hardly begun by those in English-speaking Canada."

Weir also notes that many English-speaking audiences had never...