{"product_id":"short-journey-upriver-toward-oishida-isbn-9780771015915","title":"Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida","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.“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.”\u003cbr\u003e–Jury citation, Governor General’s Award\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn poetry, few things matter so much as a hungry eye, a fresh way of responding to the world… Roo Borson is a true original.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003ci\u003eMaclean’s\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“She’s become one of the best-known Canadian poets of her generation. She’s a clear writer, clear-minded, with a dark and musical imagination.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“She absorbs one totally, dissolving the conventional distinctions between body, mind, and heart.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003ci\u003eGlobe and Mail\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“To read her poetry is to make an exhilarating discovery.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003ci\u003eToronto Star\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eRoo Borson\u003c\/b\u003e has published ten books of poems, most recently \u003ci\u003eShort Journey Upriver Toward Ôishida\u003c\/i\u003e, 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, \u003ci\u003eIntroduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei\u003c\/i\u003e, was published in 2000. She lives in Toronto.\u003cb\u003eSUMMER GRASS \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe willows are thinking again about thickness,\u003cbr\u003eslowness, lizard skin on hot rock,\u003cbr\u003eand day by day this imaging transforms them\u003cbr\u003einto what we see: dragons in leaf, draped scales\u003cbr\u003ealongside the river of harried, spring-stirred silt.\u003cbr\u003eThe magpie recites Scriabin in early morning as a mating song,\u003cbr\u003eand home is just a place you started out,\u003cbr\u003ethe only place you still know how to think from,\u003cbr\u003eso that that place is mated to this\u003cbr\u003eby necessity as well as choice,\u003cbr\u003ethough now you have to start again from here,\u003cbr\u003eand it isn’t home. Venus rising in the early evening\u003cbr\u003ebeside the Travelodge, as wayward and causal as\u003cbr\u003ewill, or beauty, or as once we willed beauty to be —\u003cbr\u003ethough this was in retrospect, and only practice\u003cbr\u003efor some other life. Do you still love poetry?\u003cbr\u003eBelow the willows, in the dry winter reeds,\u003cbr\u003ebanjo frogs begin a disconcerting raga,\u003cbr\u003eone note each, the rustling blades grow green —\u003cbr\u003eand it tires, the lichen-spotted tin canteen\u003cbr\u003esuspended in the river weeds like a turtle\u003cbr\u003eup for air: such a curious tiredness deflected there.\u003cbr\u003eAnd what would you give up,\u003cbr\u003ewhat would you give up, in the beautiful\u003cbr\u003efalse logic of math, or Greek? In the sum\u003cbr\u003eof the possible, long ago in the summer grass …\u003cbr\u003eHere beside the river I close my eyes: there\u003cbr\u003ethe little girls lean continuously across a rusted\u003cbr\u003esign that says Don’t Feed The Swans\u003cbr\u003eand feed the swans. The swans are reasoning beings;\u003cbr\u003ethe young cygnets, hatched from pins\u003cbr\u003eand old mattress stuffing, bright-eyed, learning\u003cbr\u003ewhat has bread, and what doesn’t. What doesn’t\u003cbr\u003ehave to do with this is all the rest:\u003cbr\u003eone more chance to blow out the candles and wish\u003cbr\u003efor things we wished for\u003cbr\u003ethat wouldn’t happen unless we closed our eyes.\u003cbr\u003eNot the gingko or the level gaze, or the speaking voice\u003cbr\u003ebeneath the pillow, or the waking in the morning\u003cbr\u003ewith a name. But cloud — or grief, when grief\u003cbr\u003eis loneliness and you close your eyes. Speech,\u003cbr\u003ewhen speech is loneliness, and you close your eyes.","brand":"McClelland \u0026 Stewart","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299974238437,"sku":"NP9780771015915","price":15.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780771015915.jpg?v=1767736566","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/short-journey-upriver-toward-oishida-isbn-9780771015915","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}