Herménégilde Chiasson is one of Canada's most versatile artists — a photographer and printmaker, a playwright, a filmmaker, and a painter, illustrator, and set designer. Above all, though, he is a poet. The French edition of Climats, published in 1996, was short-listed for a Governor General's Award. Chiasson's eighth book of poetry, it is the first to be translated into English.

The poems in Climates are suffused with the desire to fully inhabit, and be inhabited by, a place: Acadie. The political push-and-pull of being Acadian is a constant, even amid personal upheavals. Boundaries between poetry and prose dissolve and reappear like the boundaries between thought and dream, creating a double consciousness that is particularly Acadian.

"Climates possesses a haunting and sustained clarity that meshes vividly with the writer's superb linguistic authority and structural virtuosity (reminiscent of the work of David Jones in its commanding prose passages, the gruesome lyricality of Hubert Aquin)... The volume's quartet of entries succeeds beautifully, tracking the emotional impoverishment and universal loneliness accompanying the perceived numbness of contemporary life."

"Climates possesses a haunting and sustained clarity that meshes vividly with the writer's superb linguistic authority and structural virtuosity (reminiscent of the work of David Jones in its commanding prose passages, the gruesome lyricality of Hubert Aquin)... The volume's quartet of entries succeeds beautifully, tracking the emotional impoverishment and universal loneliness accompanying the perceived numbness of contemporary life."

- <i>Globe and Mail</i>