An exquisite croissant and the Sunday paper: reading Roo Borson.

Leckie, Ross

In 1980 Gary Geddes founded Quadrant Editions, a subscription press, an inventive small-press enterprise, and from that unusual source, in 1981, came Roo Borson's A Sad Device. It is difficult to articulate thirty years later what for us then was an astonishing and extraordinary book, nor can I fully convey its profound influence. It was a book everyone talked about. I don't think I realized how it would change my writing and, therefore, change my life.

Here was a poetry plain-spoken, but not pedestrian, haunting and eerie, yet anchored in the quotidian. And, yes, it presented sadness, but almost less as an emotion than as a kind of epistemology, a way of seeing things, a form of the elegiac mood. It had something of Neruda in it, but eschewed his theatrics. One could hear the echoes of Robert Hass, but Roo seemed more numinous or metaphysical.

I did what I tend to do: I tracked down her earlier books, including her very first, Landfall, published by Fiddlehead Poetry Books, now Goose Lane Editions. Even here one could identify the nascent voice, intent, sardonic, "having hidden nothing once again." I hadn't encountered anything so insistently casual, yet so startling.

By 1982 I was in Toronto and I met Roo. We became friends. She was exactly what I expected: thoughtful, witty, philosophical, and spooky. I had a full beard then, a sad device, and I believe it was she who christened me Rostoyevsky, a moniker that still pops up now and again. She has that hand-on-the-shoulder friendly curiosity about her that is so evident in her poetry.

I was not surprised, in 1984's The Whole Night, Coming Home, to happen on prose poems: the form seems so suited to her. The vernacular of common prose that appears so disarming, so simple, becomes the ground we walk on, so that, head in the clouds, so to speak, we can discover "strange relations, by proxy." The tone is often reverent, but perhaps this word today means naive or oblivious. For Borson reverent means attentive, intelligent, keen, suggesting that ability to register nuance.

Now, Arc presents Roo's "Cedarvale Diary." It has what we expect of the language of a diary: something familiar, laconic, and seemingly artless. It also has, however, that precision of poetry, and that daily reflective quality, "always the flavour of a given life, both evanescent and repeatable." We are often looking over the shoulder of the writer, riveted by what she is seeing. We feel both excitement and repulsion as a hawk pecks at the flesh of a blue jay. We feel the routine of "the gangs of raccoons" that "comb through the neighbourhood, making their strange whoops and trills." We find the gentle humour of "My neighbour," who "leaning out from her porch, makes kissing noises, calling in the cat."

This diary is supple and expressive. It is not dogged, but it encompasses a year, holds it in a warm embrace. It is candid. And it is like an exquisite croissant and the Sunday paper: it holds that kind of luxurious pleasure.