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?” This is perhaps the most pressing question of our day. How much have we given up as a people by forsaking poetry and surrendering ourselves to the rationalism which epitomizes Western culture? Or, a little later: “If reason is a sixth sense, /does it, like the others, lie?” So begins our journey, with Borson as our guide, to a place with a vaguely Eastern flavour, where words sound much like haiku, where Japanese folk tales unfold in the background, where often the point is to evade the necessity for a point.
The longest piece within the collection is an essay, “Persimmons.” I use the term “essay” loosely, for while it is written in prose like an essay, it doesn’t lay claim to any point of persuasion, except in the vague sense of persuasion to a point of view, a view of life’s unfolding, the passage of time, the death of one’s parents. The essay is framed by a journey to an ancestral home. In the opening, the narrator calls to mind a story by Tanizaki concerning a man’s journey upriver to his ancestral village. We accompany the narrator on a similar journey, but hers is a journey through memory that has, as its point of departure, the sight of a persimmon tree where “a hundred or so fruits hung like glowing lanterns from the slender boughs.” The persimmons remind her of Tanizaki’s story, where persimmons are offered as refreshment to the travelers, but moreso, the persimmons remind her of two trees which had grown in her mother’s garden.
We are not sharing a journey to an ancestral home, nor are we witnessing an epiphany. This is not really concerned with the discovery that a hollow place lingers after parents have died, nor that the past is irretrievable, nor that things have changed irrevocably. These discoveries are given. Instead, what we share with the narrator is a sense of reconciliation. She tells us of the sense of abandonment which followed her mother’s death, of the emptiness which came particularly when she had to clean out her mother’s refrigerator. But the abandonment and the emptiness are recalled; they do not belong to the “now” of the narrative. Instead, we share in the intrusion of a growing calm. There is a reconciliation, too, to the things which can never be communicated, perhaps because there are no words, or because they cannot be known. She remembers her mother’s gardener, George, who was Japanese and not really named George. As a child, she often overheard her mother and George discuss the garden “though not once was I able to catch a hint of George’s replies, which were apparently so understated that even the breeze failed to carry them for any distance.” Perhaps she caught so little of their speech because they had an “intimate knowledge” so that “little explanation was needed—as though a tendril of ivy were itself a sentence, or a flower a burst of sentient feeling.” Later, George returned to Japan, but she never learned the reason. Now, with her mother dead, she will never know the reason, but this not knowing seems not to trouble her.
It seems natural that as one works to a place of reconciliation with the loss of parents or of home, one also turns the reflective gaze on one’s own life. For a poet, that might mean asking: what value is there in anything I have written? This question receives fierce scrutiny in the piece titled “A Bit of History.” The narrator visits a town which has dwindled since the railway was re–routed. Now, an old trestle has been incorporated into a system of trails. But a boy has died falling from the trestle and the parents have left three poems at the site. They aren’t good poems. “They were the sort of poems that say what they mean.” But they are heartfelt, and now they seem to act as magnets, attracting other young people who are troubled. And so the narrator finds herself coaxing a distraught girl down from the edge. The poet/narrator is stricken by the ethics of her role – poetry really does move people. She wonders if maybe the dead boy’s parents “should try speaking to him in their hearts instead of in poems meant to be seen in public places. Maybe in that way they might honour the living, and save death for the dead ….” She persuades the girl to step down from the edge, but, as with George the gardener, she does not know what becomes of the girl. She resigns herself to a limited role in the drama of the girl’s life.
The same sort of stock—taking appears in the final piece, “Upriver Toward Oishida.” The narrator is mindful of a friend’s poem which speaks of turning 50 and wanting a change. She has turned 49 and reflects that by this age, the Japanese poet, Basho, had already embarked on his final journey which took him through the village of Oishida. Along the way, the master kept a record of his travels, and also left poems scattered behind him, as if in payment for hospitality. Eventually, we encounter him on his deathbed in Osaka. The precise circumstances of his death are in dispute. Once again, our narrator is uncertain of the story, and it doesn’t really matter. A friend asks Basho if a certain poem should be his jisei, his death poem. He answers: “tell them that all my everyday poems should be considered my jisei.”
Oddly, as I finished this collection, I found myself utterly taken by the quality of Borson’s poems, and persuaded myself that Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida must be her jisei. However, I find no evidence of her death, only evidence of justly deserved awards. Even so, this is a work which would be worthy of such an honour, as fine a work as I have encountered in some time.