Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida
- Publisher
- McClelland & Stewart
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2004
- Category
- Places, Canadian, Women Authors
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780771015915
- Publish Date
- Mar 2004
- List Price
- $18.99
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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.
About the author
ROO BORSON is the author of ten books of poetry, including Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida, which won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She has also been involved in a number of collaborative projects, including Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, by Pain Not Bread (Roo Borson, Kim Maltman, and Andy Patton). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, such as Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics, the Harbrace Anthology of Poetry, and the Norton Introduction to Literature. Roo Borson lives in Toronto with poet and collaborator Kim Maltman.
Baziju are currently at work on a new manuscript project called Short Moral Tales.
Awards
- Winner, Griffin Poetry Prize
- Winner, Governor General's Literary Award - Poetry
- Short-listed, Trillium Book Award
Excerpt: Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida (by (author) Roo Borson)
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.
Editorial Reviews
“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
