First up, Roo Borson:

Steven: You can't tell a book by its cover, but I'd have to say this is one winning cover. The Japanese print, and the title, "Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida," hold out hope that here we would have a pared down, hard-imaged, and maybe even playful or sly reflection on 'life as a river' or something. The opening line was perfect for that - "The willows are thinking again about thickness" - and then came the let-down. Page after page, line after line of falling, declarative statements. It's a rhythm that stalls any expectation after awhile, and I had the feeling that as a midlife examination and search for a source this wasn't going to go anywhere interesting. 

To be fair, that seems to be what she's getting at, but since I'm reading this for pleasure I wanted at least a shared smirk here and there. Every time she made me sit up and take notice (e.g., "It may be / one of these so-called gods turns over in its sleep, / and so spring comes") she muddies it all with things that just don't make sense to me ("and so spring comes. The moral order of minerals / the code of the samurai in stone.") Huh? Roo seems to do that a lot.

However, when she moves from lined poems to prose poems everything changes, and the images are clear, fresh, simple and interesting: "My eyes, even my teeth, are not what they used to be - so whatever I say now I say with a lisp." That's funny, and sad, and true (from my own bitter experience - Roo and I are the same age, and we seem to be going through some of the same dental problems . . . ). And the whole "Persimmons" section, her narrative voice carrying the beauty of the poetry as she moves 'upriver' to some form of enlightenment, lives up to the promise of the cover.

Throughout the book there are hints that she's dissatisfied with poetry (though it keeps calling her back), and I thought well, yes, that shows in things like the linked haiku-like verses in the "Water Colour" section, that same depressed falling accent going on and on, but to me that's not the spirit of haiku, or Basho whose shoulder she keeps peeking over. And yet she can write something as simple as this: "At the early stages it is possible to gauge the ripeness of a persimmon by sight, but once the skin begins to turn translucent all finer judgment must rely on touch." That sentence is lovely, in part because of the sound and shape of it, its lilt, but also because it takes her out of herelf, and me with it. She should rely on touch more often.

So . . . loved the prose, was disappointed in the poems.

Alex: We agree on the cover! Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida is a nice looking book. I also like the fact that it is "printed on acid-free paper that is 100% recycled, ancient-forest friendly (100% post-consumer recycled)."

I didn't enjoy the poetry very much. I thought it was incoherent. Borson has a knack for tossing off poetic fragments - she can be quite imagistic - but with anything longer than three lines you notice that she doesn't have a great sense of rhythm and has trouble sustaining a particular line of thought in verse. And so she has to write in prose. There is a lot of prose in this book. I didn't like it as much as you Steve.

I liked things like this:

All night possums on the roof
play leaping sliding games - 
and now the rain.

But I didn't like this:

     The planets rise
and set with all the limpid consternation the foreheads
of philosophers must feel, glowering their way
through problems they've posed themselves. Old light,
old when it reaches us. Lion-sounds from the zoo as
dusk comes on, smelling the river, no doubt - 
a lament. All night the miseries of others
gnawing at our bones. But dreams
are only dreams, unless they're the dead:
elaborate in autumn's gold frame, or those resonant
kitchen sounds that let us know we're loved. Tea,
wheat, sand, water, paper, gold - a life in which,
if you pause, you can hear the dust settling,
in which summer nears winter and disappears,
each seems the only condition possible,
candid while it lasts.

The sense of the passage is hard to follow. It just seems like a bunch of non-sequiturs, personal associations and random statements. Borson also has a thing for making seeming-profound comments that remain vague and ineffable in a very un-poetic kind of way. Take the line "dreams are only dreams, unless they're the dead." Sounds heavy, poetic even, but what does it mean? I think it means dreams are only dreams unless they become involved, somehow, with our memories (memory seems to be a big theme in Canadian poetry this year). But this remains a rather abstract notion, drifting off into a string of hard-to-relate nouns. In another poem she begins by asking "If reason is a sixth sense, / does it, like the others, lie?" I thought this was a great question to start a poem with. I mean you could imagine a very good poem starting like that. But I couldn't see how Borson went on to attempt much of an answer, or even an illustration of whatever it was she was getting at. 

The "big picture" of how Borson's memories of her own childhood relate to the poet Basho's life and work escaped me. I didn't enjoy this book very much. Not enough energy or sense of fun, and not successful as meditative verse either.

Zach: Well gentleman, unfortunately this is not the Alcuin Awards and while it's lovely that Roo and Steven could share a pre-senescent dental moment together, I have to agree with Alex on this book, that its content is, despite generally adequate writing with occasional glimpses of actual poetry, dull and heavily laden with ponderous precious poeticisms.

In particular, I found her - what's the term, 'metapoetic'? - musings about the failure/inadequacy of poetry irritating and indicative of just how incestuous and narcissistic poetry can be when poets accept that their only audience is their peer group. I mean god almighty, look at this:

Do you still love poetry?

Not if this is what poetry is. I, too, dislike it . . . 

No, pure heart,
you're not the only poetry, though you may be the best

Holy apostrophe, Borson! If this is poetry of the 'pure heart' then I'd have to say this speaker is mistaken.

where the god of poetry is poetry. 

What is particularly disappointing is that this wanky line is the conclusion to a section of a long poem and is immediately preceded by the strong lines "All six thousand miles of me I laid down, / nerves and blood and faeces - / lay down, eyes closed." Nerves and blood and faeces are precisely what this oh-so-ethereal collection needs a lot more of. 

I had never expected poetry to provide for anything beyond itself, but now I feel unhappy with poetry - or with myself - for not exceeding those expectations.

The Japanese, still writing in classical Chinese while adapting literature to their own purposes, were the first to compose poetic diaries. But there's only so much that even poetry can attempt.

. . . 

The poems rise up (now, as then), but the feeling isn't in poetry

These lowered expectations and disappointments, and pedantic learned musings thereupon, characterize what is wrong with this book. David Solway has bemoaned the "fey orientalism" of many of our poets and Short Journey, to me, is ample proof that he is on to something. This is a "poetic diary," not a book of poetry; more poetical than poetic; it is a book of ecological angst mitigated by self-absorption and pseudo-mysticism that pales in comparison, say, with Di Brandt's Now You Care, which would have made a far more compelling addition to this shortlist than Borson - but I guess we wouldn't want to do that, since Brandt already got a nomination for the Griffin, now would we? Can we save ourselves a lot of time and just cut this one from the running now? Please?

Alex: "Metapoetic" might be the word du jour. I think they called it "self-referentiality" when I was in school. Either way it is writing in despair of an audience.

I have nothing against a poet being down on herself, or on poetry in general, but Borson just seems like she's stuck in a rut here. It's a lethargic, random, frustrating collection. I don't know if she's being affected or if she honestly can't express herself coherently, but things don't add up. I couldn't figure out what she was talking about a lot of the time, and not always because of what might be personal references. She is just obscure. And where is the music? The "lilt" Steve mentions comes in a line of prose.

So yeah, I'd cut this one from the running. Unless the others are really bad.

NEXT: What About Tim Bowling?