Book Review: Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida by Roo Borson

Reviewing a collection of poems and short prose by Roo Borson is like reviewing a book of scripture. There is something in her voice that is spiritual, something that speaks, perhaps, beyond ordinary experience. And so a simple review is pointless, impossible even. A review seeks to nail down a work, isolate its meanings, explain things.

But with Borson's words, one doubts they can be bullied into revealing anything that can't best be said by the words just as they are. Without our coaxing, her words lament their own shortcomings: "But there's only so much that even poetry can attempt." The best I can do here is share a little of the time I have spent working my way through their currents, to my own sense of — what? Not resolution. Not understanding. Sense of place?

Roo Borson was born in 1952 in California, obtained a B.A. at Goddard College in Vermont, then an M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia. Short Journey is her tenth volume of poetry. Published in 2004, it received the Governor General's Prize for poetry.

As the title suggests, the imagery and meanings which work this imaginative landscape are those of flowing water, of movement from one place to another, of ripples from one time to the next. Her journey is merely beginning in the place where most of us have already reached our limits. These observations are apparent early in the first poem: "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..." Necessity and Choice — the poles in a debate that has traveled through the Enlightenment to the present day without resolution, yet Borson has collapsed a grand debate with a few simple lines, then moves on from there to the question: "Do you still love poetry?"

Who is the "you" of her question? Is it a lover? Is it us, the readers? Is it Basho, the 17th-century Japanese poet who figures large in the title piece? At the very least, she is addressing us, for it is our love of poetry which is most in doubt. It is our capacity to tend to the spiritual which is most in jeopardy. "And what would you give up," she asks, "what would you give up, in the beautiful false logic of math, or Greek?"

Article Author: David Barker

Theoblogger - a forty-something ex-lawyer theologian from Toronto dedicated to finding the nuggets beneath the mountains of crap that some try to pass off as belief.

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