From Amazon
This collection, which won the 2004 Governor General's Award for Poetry, includes meditative poems influenced by the masters of old Japan as well as three short essays: a reflection on the death of the poet's mother ("Persimmons"), a memory of talking a young girl on a bridge out of suicide, and ruminations on a journey upriver taken by the Japanese poet, Basho, in the 1600s. Borson, like Basho before her, believes nature itself is poetry. The signal that Borson is a master of natural images appears early, when she states in the first poem ("Summer Grass") that willows transform themselves into "dragons in leaf, draped scales." A close engagement with the seasons marks the collection: a god turns over in its sleep "and so spring comes"; "against autumn's enameled blue skies," "the dye runs and it's summer."
The language is rich, filled with grace and delicacy, and refreshingly positive: the "banjo frogs," the crickets ringing out "good house, good house," "what shrivels the leaves still fattens the eels." The poems reference numerous classical musicians: Bach, Beethoven, Hindemith, Chopin, Satie, and, indeed, the tone of the collection emanates the quiet, soothing qualities of the great composers. But as if to prove she is still part of this modern world, Borson can throw out a line striking in its contrast and modernity: "No one about (it's Sunday), but an empty phone-box outside the Mobil station keeps ringing and ringing." --Mark Frutkin
Review
“Roo Borson invites us to embark on a meditative, imaginative and spiritual journey. This book has a profound inner life. It is resonant and whole, moving with quiet, apparently easy steps into the depth of human experience.”
–Jury citation, Governor General’s Award
In poetry, few things matter so much as a hungry eye, a fresh way of responding to the world… Roo Borson is a true original.”
–Maclean’s
“She’s become one of the best-known Canadian poets of her generation. She’s a clear writer, clear-minded, with a dark and musical imagination.”
–Washington Post
“She absorbs one totally, dissolving the conventional distinctions between body, mind, and heart.”
–Globe and Mail
“To read her poetry is to make an exhilarating discovery.”
–Toronto Star
–Jury citation, Governor General’s Award
In poetry, few things matter so much as a hungry eye, a fresh way of responding to the world… Roo Borson is a true original.”
–Maclean’s
“She’s become one of the best-known Canadian poets of her generation. She’s a clear writer, clear-minded, with a dark and musical imagination.”
–Washington Post
“She absorbs one totally, dissolving the conventional distinctions between body, mind, and heart.”
–Globe and Mail
“To read her poetry is to make an exhilarating discovery.”
–Toronto Star
Book Description
In Roo Borson’s new watershed collection, it is as though language were being taught to increase its powers of concentration, to hearken simultaneously to the fully impinged-upon senses, the reflecting mind with its griefs and yearnings, the heart with its burden of live memory. Always “the line bends as the river bends,” a quick ever-adjusting music that carries in its current those cherished, perishable, details of eye and ear, mid-life reflections on loss and home, the subtle shifts in season suddenly made strange and re-awakened. Recurrently, probingly, the line returns to the place of poetry in our lives. In the spirit of Basho’s famous journey to the far north, Borson’s “short journey” reminds us of the role of poetry in shaping and deepening our engagement with the world.
From the Back Cover
“Roo Borson invites us to embark on a meditative, imaginative and spiritual journey. This book has a profound inner life. It is resonant and whole, moving with quiet, apparently easy steps into the depth of human experience.”
–Jury citation, Governor General’s Award
In poetry, few things matter so much as a hungry eye, a fresh way of responding to the world… Roo Borson is a true original.”
–Maclean’s
“She’s become one of the best-known Canadian poets of her generation. She’s a clear writer, clear-minded, with a dark and musical imagination.”
–Washington Post
“She absorbs one totally, dissolving the conventional distinctions between body, mind, and heart.”
–Globe and Mail
“To read her poetry is to make an exhilarating discovery.”
–Toronto Star
–Jury citation, Governor General’s Award
In poetry, few things matter so much as a hungry eye, a fresh way of responding to the world… Roo Borson is a true original.”
–Maclean’s
“She’s become one of the best-known Canadian poets of her generation. She’s a clear writer, clear-minded, with a dark and musical imagination.”
–Washington Post
“She absorbs one totally, dissolving the conventional distinctions between body, mind, and heart.”
–Globe and Mail
“To read her poetry is to make an exhilarating discovery.”
–Toronto Star
About the Author
Roo Borson has published ten books of poems, most recently Short Journey Upriver Toward Ôishida, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, as well as a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. With Kim Maltman and Andy Patton, she is a member of the collaborative poetry group Pain Not Bread, whose first book, Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, was published in 2000. She lives in Toronto.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
SUMMER GRASS
The willows are thinking again about thickness,
slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,
and day by day this imaging transforms them
into what we see: dragons in leaf, draped scales
alongside the river of harried, spring-stirred silt.
The magpie recites Scriabin in early morning as a mating song,
and home is just a place you started out,
the only place you still know how to think from,
so that that place is mated to this
by necessity as well as choice,
though now you have to start again from here,
and it isn’t home. Venus rising in the early evening
beside the Travelodge, as wayward and causal as
will, or beauty, or as once we willed beauty to be —
though this was in retrospect, and only practice
for some other life. Do you still love poetry?
Below the willows, in the dry winter reeds,
banjo frogs begin a disconcerting raga,
one note each, the rustling blades grow green —
and it tires, the lichen-spotted tin canteen
suspended in the river weeds like a turtle
up for air: such a curious tiredness deflected there.
And what would you give up,
what would you give up, in the beautiful
false logic of math, or Greek? In the sum
of the possible, long ago in the summer grass …
Here beside the river I close my eyes: there
the little girls lean continuously across a rusted
sign that says Don’t Feed The Swans
and feed the swans. The swans are reasoning beings;
the young cygnets, hatched from pins
and old mattress stuffing, bright-eyed, learning
what has bread, and what doesn’t. What doesn’t
have to do with this is all the rest:
one more chance to blow out the candles and wish
for things we wished for
that wouldn’t happen unless we closed our eyes.
Not the gingko or the level gaze, or the speaking voice
beneath the pillow, or the waking in the morning
with a name. But cloud — or grief, when grief
is loneliness and you close your eyes. Speech,
when speech is loneliness, and you close your eyes.
The willows are thinking again about thickness,
slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,
and day by day this imaging transforms them
into what we see: dragons in leaf, draped scales
alongside the river of harried, spring-stirred silt.
The magpie recites Scriabin in early morning as a mating song,
and home is just a place you started out,
the only place you still know how to think from,
so that that place is mated to this
by necessity as well as choice,
though now you have to start again from here,
and it isn’t home. Venus rising in the early evening
beside the Travelodge, as wayward and causal as
will, or beauty, or as once we willed beauty to be —
though this was in retrospect, and only practice
for some other life. Do you still love poetry?
Below the willows, in the dry winter reeds,
banjo frogs begin a disconcerting raga,
one note each, the rustling blades grow green —
and it tires, the lichen-spotted tin canteen
suspended in the river weeds like a turtle
up for air: such a curious tiredness deflected there.
And what would you give up,
what would you give up, in the beautiful
false logic of math, or Greek? In the sum
of the possible, long ago in the summer grass …
Here beside the river I close my eyes: there
the little girls lean continuously across a rusted
sign that says Don’t Feed The Swans
and feed the swans. The swans are reasoning beings;
the young cygnets, hatched from pins
and old mattress stuffing, bright-eyed, learning
what has bread, and what doesn’t. What doesn’t
have to do with this is all the rest:
one more chance to blow out the candles and wish
for things we wished for
that wouldn’t happen unless we closed our eyes.
Not the gingko or the level gaze, or the speaking voice
beneath the pillow, or the waking in the morning
with a name. But cloud — or grief, when grief
is loneliness and you close your eyes. Speech,
when speech is loneliness, and you close your eyes.
