Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida

(Paperback)

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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.

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 Generals 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.
Macleans

Shes become one of the best-known Canadian poets of her generation. Shes 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

Author Bio

Roo Borson has published ten books of poems, most recently Short Journey Upriver Toward ishida, 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.