Sheep’s Vigil: By a Fervent Person, the latest collection of poetry by Eirin Moure, also known as Erin Mouré, is a translation, or transelation, of the Portuguese O Guardador de Rebanhos by Alberto Caeiro, also known as Fernando Pessoa. And if you think that last sentence is a tangle of naming, wait until you open this book.

The playful possibility of naming inherent in, or between, languages is one of the many threads Mouré has woven through her eight previous books of poetry. In Sheep’s Vigil, the name games begin on the cover with the introduction of Mouré’s alter ego, Eirin Moure – perhaps inspired by Fernando Pessoa’s habit of writing under heteronyms (of which Alberto Caeiro was one). Then there is the apparent misspelling of translation as transelation, making “elation” a central part of translation.

Caeiro’s O Guardador de Rebanhos is a series of pastoral poems that denounces “weak” poets and philosophers who anthropomorphize nature or invest the natural world with mystical meaning. In her translation, Moure transplants these “natural” poems into the often forgotten natural settings of metro Toronto, complicating Caeiro’s original arguments in the process: “And I see my own figure/on the crest of Bathurst,/Guarding my flock and viewing my ideas/Or guarding my ideas and viewing my flock.…”

The collection is printed in both Portuguese and English, allowing Moure to use the space between the languages to add new layers of interpretation to Caeiro’s text: “Let’s call a spade a spade, a star a star, creeks creeks and flowers—/Well, let’s call them flores….”

Though Sheep’s Vigil is certainly the most accessible of Mouré’s books – what she calls in her notes “my simple book” – it does not read as a radical departure from her previous work. She still points readers to the funny flexibility of words that gives poetry its greatest humour, and greatest power:“I feel like a child in a T-shirt/Amazed by just being born/and realizing ‘hey, I’m born’….”