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.

Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Borson, Roo

Genre Fiction

MCCLELLAND STEWART

Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida

History & Criticism

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.

Box Kite

Maltman, Kim

Poetry

House of Anansi Press

Introduction to the Introduction to the Introduction by Andre Alexis
For me, reading the Introduction was like being caught in a spring shower while waiting for the 41, and running into a library to get out of the rain and, because the rain lasts, wandering the aisles on the fifth floor, taking books from the shelves (Waley's translations from the Chinese, a work by Roland Barthes, an oversized book about eastern birds...), draping my winter coat on a chair and sitting down to read. 
My coat smells of wet coconut matting, and the library is warm, and I fall asleep, my head on the desk, and dream about a strange library filled with impossibly rare and impossibly beautiful works: Waley on birds, Barthes' translations from the Chinese, an oversized book about rain... 
And when I wake, moments later, after what seems like hours, I have the momentary and vivid conviction that, if I listened properly, I could translate water into any language at all.
Pain Not Bread is a collaborative writing group formed in 1990 by Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton. In Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, they occupy the border created by translation, allusion and echo, and make it into habitable space, a place where the subtle sensitivities of poets from the troubled late Tang Dynasty (Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, ...) blend with our own millennial anxieties. What do poets do in a difficult time? It's as though Pain Not Bread were talking and drinking with their Tang contemporaries on some old rickety ferry making its way back and forth between English and Chinese, Chinese and English, in the process weaving together a music of supreme nuance and tonal registration, a mode of speaking and feeling which is "undisfigured by sentiment" and yet riddled with its own mortality.

Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei

Brick Books

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 gardenscapes, 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 antididactic 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.

Personal History

Biographies & Memoirs

Zwicky, Jan (B01)

Arts & Literature

Pedlar Pr

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