World Literary Awards

← Back to awarded works
Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida

Griffin Poetry Prize

Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida

Roo Borson

A poetry collection built from observation and memory around Japanese landscapes and the experience of travel. It delicately evokes movement toward a distant place and the shifting sense of belonging that follows.

travelJapanmemorylandscape

Work Information

Landscapes of travel give rise to belonging and memory.

A Canadian poet whose quiet, contemplative style delicately renders landscape, memory, and travel experience.

Book Information

Publisher
McClelland & Stewart
Published
2004-03-16
Pages
96 pages
Language
英語
Size
14.5 x 0.6 x 21.6 cm
ISBN-13
9780771015915
ISBN-10
0771015917
Price
3067 JPY
Category
洋書/Literature & Fiction/History & Criticism/Criticism & Theory

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 has published ten books of poems, most recently Short Journey Upriver Toward Ôishida , 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, Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei , was published in 2000. She lives in Toronto.

Related Literary Awards