New Releases by Roo Borson

A captivating and poignant new collection of poetry from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Roo Borson that probes some of our most important questions. After Roo Borson''s two previous collections -- Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida and Rain; road; an open boat -- set the seasons in motion, focusing the poet''s mind on time, mortality, transience, and absence, Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar arrives to complete the triptych. From the glittering, classically rendered image to a freighted, lucid, narrative line, Borson''s voice can shift and refract while holding true to the momentary facts of the shifting, given world. Her meditations are a kind of fidelity to inquiry, to attachment, to what can''t be fully known. Here the distant past collides with the near future, the present opens suddenly into another age, and friendship becomes the measure of time''s salience. These poems depict what vanishes, the various modest homes where half-remembered lives all flow toward their common end. Roo Borson has crowned a sustained achievement with a work of startling intimacy and vividness.

"A piece of paper with writing on it is flat, but when what is written on that paper fills the mind of a reader, it takes off into the wind like a box kite on a windy day," writes Baziju — the shared voice of poets Roo Borson and Kim Maltman. This exquisite, collaboratively written sequence of prose poems, unfolding through rich, delicate imagery, journeys through streets and gardens, houses and temples, cities and countryside, Canada and China. It is a meditation on the way we travel between places and between times, and how words and ideas travel between languages. Baziju explores the literature of China, from centuries past to the present, exploring, at the same time, the meaning of hope and of home: childhood homes, the homes we grow into, and the homes in our minds. In Lu Xun''s classic story "My Old Home," the hero returns from a distant city to the home he left two decades earlier. Hope, he ponders, "is just like the roads of the earth... . [T]o begin with the earth has no roads, but where many people pass, there a road is made." These sensual, deeply personal prose poems ponder change, loss, friendship, and belonging. In a life in which every detail has significance, the smallest observation grows, and spreads like the branches of wisteria.

The first new collection of poetry from Roo Borson since her highly acclaimed collection Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida, winner of three major prizes, including the Griffin Poetry Prize. Roo Borson''s new collection continues the exploration of form, tone, musicality, and content begun in her widely acclaimed previous collection. Here, co-existing peacefully, are the river stone, painted white, that greets the visitor to the grave of the poet James K. Baxter in the far back country of New Zealand''s Wanganui River; the Beijing night sky, turned apricot by the smog and full moon of the Mid-Autumn Festival; the crypts of Toronto''s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, seen as potential living spaces; an old friend speaking "knowledgeably, reverentially, and at the same time light-heartedly, in this way gradually restoring significance to the world." By turns wry and ecstatic, droll and elegiac, quizzical and contemplative, this is a major new work by one of our most singular and compelling poets.

Personal History is a book consisting of eight essays in the belles lettres tradition. Of the work, Borson writes: "From the inside, each life seems an unbounded world; from the outside, a design can at times be seen. Just as repetition and variation form the heart of poetry and song, so too the seemingly singular events and questions that arise within a given life are echoed or "answered," recurring, most often more than once, in another time and place, sometimes another key. This idea underlies the eight pieces comprising this collection. Two begin from the standpoint of reading and writing, two from painting, two from particular places or "garden-scapes," and two from aspects of personal history and memory, but all of these elements and standpoints revolve throughout, interlinking the essays in an exploration of the adjacent regions of life and art." Roo Borson was drawn to the fine arts (and poetry in particular) from a very early age and this prose companion, rooted in the immediacy of experience and anti-didactic in bent, is dedicated to the idea that down the decades a book, or an image, however recorded, might fall now and again into the right hands.

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.

A new collection of free-verse and prose poems by Borson. Some strong language.

This first selection from the poetry of Roo Borson, a three-time winner of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation''s Literary Competition, ranges from the short lyric through the prose poem and is comprised of pieces spanning a decade and a half of work. Her work depicts human events within a set of vivid, elemental larger scales - of earth and stars, cities and centuries - where the human flickers in and out of significance, solitary yet intimately connected, and reperceives these relationships in deft and sudden ways.