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A Sad Device
Poetry by Roo Borson
- GenresPoetry
63 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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About the author
Roo Borson
20 books8 followersRuth Elizabeth Borson, who writes under the name Roo Borson (born 20 January 1952 in Berkeley, California) is a Canadian poet who lives in Toronto. She is a graduate of the University of British Columbia.
She has received many awards for her work, including the Governor General's Literary Award, 2004, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, 2005 for Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida. She lives in Toronto with poet Kim Maltman, and with Maltman and Andy Patton is a member of the collaborative performance poetry ensemble Pain Not Bread.
She has received many awards for her work, including the Governor General's Literary Award, 2004, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, 2005 for Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida. She lives in Toronto with poet Kim Maltman, and with Maltman and Andy Patton is a member of the collaborative performance poetry ensemble Pain Not Bread.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 29, 2022
The moon: hoof-print in ice.
Someone's shoes chewing an icy path.
The wasted intricacy of each snowflake.
A field without a man in it.
A rusted plow filling with snow.
* * *
Swathed in a nautilus-curve of cloud,
the full moon seeks out every place.
It smells like ice.
Compared with it the earthly trees reek of patchouli.
The limbs of lovers, their eyes of haunted oil
flicker in the light, the earth a vast hearth.
Such secretive things out there: asteroids hurtle like bricks.
Each creature a clock, ticking out a certain measure of life.
The look at you with their doleful eyes, and you look back.
Tonight the wind isn't wind but a chorus
of transparent masks. You can't see them,
you merely believe. History is beginning to demand
an end to the story. A meteor slides by:
nowhere you have ever been.
* * *
An orange moon mushrooming
through a wilderness of black stacks,
one whole autumn fled past the open window.
Five summers a coyote left holes all through you
with its voice. I lay in the cold grass watching
two searchlights pace like lost dogs,
while you leaned against a building somewhere.
A continent ablaze with gas stations.
We did not know each other.
What do you make of any of this?
Once an ill-destined creature drank from a waterfall,
before we fell in with our own kind forever.
Someone's shoes chewing an icy path.
The wasted intricacy of each snowflake.
A field without a man in it.
A rusted plow filling with snow.
- Abundance, pg. 6
* * *
Swathed in a nautilus-curve of cloud,
the full moon seeks out every place.
It smells like ice.
Compared with it the earthly trees reek of patchouli.
The limbs of lovers, their eyes of haunted oil
flicker in the light, the earth a vast hearth.
Such secretive things out there: asteroids hurtle like bricks.
Each creature a clock, ticking out a certain measure of life.
The look at you with their doleful eyes, and you look back.
Tonight the wind isn't wind but a chorus
of transparent masks. You can't see them,
you merely believe. History is beginning to demand
an end to the story. A meteor slides by:
nowhere you have ever been.
- Moon, pg. 19
* * *
An orange moon mushrooming
through a wilderness of black stacks,
one whole autumn fled past the open window.
Five summers a coyote left holes all through you
with its voice. I lay in the cold grass watching
two searchlights pace like lost dogs,
while you leaned against a building somewhere.
A continent ablaze with gas stations.
We did not know each other.
What do you make of any of this?
Once an ill-destined creature drank from a waterfall,
before we fell in with our own kind forever.
- Before We Knew Each Other, pg. 36
September 23, 2020
At first I was a little leery of the declarations about men and women, but the startling images helped me keep reading and by the end of it I felt very attached to this yellowing and fragile copy in my college library, and determined to read more by the author.
Some lines:
“The conflicting scale of things.”
“The sunsets like an armful/of dying flamingoes.”
“History we make up to go to sleep by. That way/the hugeness of space/does not damage us.”
—From “At Night You Can Almost See the Corona of Bodies”
“I love/the fragile concaves of the body:/the twilight beneath the eyes/the double hollows/where the ankle once had wings.”
—From “Collected Landscapes”
Some lines:
“The conflicting scale of things.”
“The sunsets like an armful/of dying flamingoes.”
“History we make up to go to sleep by. That way/the hugeness of space/does not damage us.”
—From “At Night You Can Almost See the Corona of Bodies”
“I love/the fragile concaves of the body:/the twilight beneath the eyes/the double hollows/where the ankle once had wings.”
—From “Collected Landscapes”
February 15, 2017
The moon is a recurrent character in this selection of poems. One of Borson’s talents is her ability to find the rural experience, or analogies thereof, even in urban settings—e.g. in parks, markets, light from street lamps and windows.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews