Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida

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.

<b>Roo Borson</b> has published nine previous books of poems – including <i>Water Memory</i> (1996) and <i>Night Walk: Selected Poems</i> (1994), a finalist for the Governor General’s Award – and has won awards for her poetry as well as for her essays. With Kim Maltman and Andy Patton, she is a member of the collaborative poetry group Pain Not Bread, whose first book, <i>Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei</i>, was published in 2000. She lives in Toronto.