> Skip to content
  • Published: 15 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9780771012242
  • Imprint: McClelland & Stewart
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar

Poems



A captivating and poignant new collection of poetry from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Roo Borson that probes some of our most important questions.


After Roo Borson's two previous collections -- Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida and Rain; road; an open boat -- set the seasons in motion, focusing the poet's mind on time, mortality, transience, and absence, Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar arrives to complete the triptych. From the glittering, classically rendered image to a freighted, lucid, narrative line, Borson's voice can shift and refract while holding true to the momentary facts of the shifting, given world. Her meditations are a kind of fidelity to inquiry, to attachment, to what can't be fully known. Here the distant past collides with the near future, the present opens suddenly into another age, and friendship becomes the measure of time's salience. These poems depict what vanishes, the various modest homes where half-remembered lives all flow toward their common end. Roo Borson has crowned a sustained achievement with a work of startling intimacy and vividness.

  • Published: 15 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9780771012242
  • Imprint: McClelland & Stewart
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

About the author

ROO BORSON

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.

Also by ROO BORSON

See all

Praise for Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar

Praise for Roo Borson's Poetry:  • "In poetry, few things matter so much as a hungry eye, a fresh way of responding to the world . . . Roo Borson is a true original." -- Maclean's  • "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." -- Jury citation, Governor General's Award  • "This is the work of a poet writing at the height of her powers. It is a poetic journal of mortality, . . . of entering middle age, and of journeying through landscape, seasons, plants, pasts, to find it again. The book is a small perfection in its construction, moving deftly through seasons and forms . . ." -- Jury citation, Griffin Poetry Prize