Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida
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Volume 16 Issue 4 (December 2014) Article 6
Shoshannah Ganz,
"Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida"
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/iss4/6>
Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.4 (2014)
Thematic Issue New Work in Ecocriticism. Ed. Simon C. Estok and Murali Sivaramakrishnan
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/iss4/>
Ōishida" Shoshannah Ganz shows how the limited focus of research on Roo Borson oversimplifies the
poetry and ignores the tradition that Borson is aligning her work with both in form and content:
classical Chinese and Japanese poetry and their perspectives on nature. Further, Ganz explores the ways in
which Borson's poetry overcomes intuitively the binaries of East/West, human/non-human, and the
further binaries within the human/non-human created through representational language. Ganz
contextualizes Borson's work within the master/disciple lineage of Chinese and Japanese tradition and
explores how Borson incorporates the resonances of Japanese place names and talismanic uses of
nature and seasonal words into an Anglophone North American context to show similarly Japanese
perspectives on impermanence and the place of humans as product and producer of nature.
Shoshannah GANZ
Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida
Roo (Ruth Elizabeth) Borson's tenth poetry collection, Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida published
in 2004, won two of the highest honors in Canadian literature—the Governor General's Award in 2005
and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006. Mike Quinn discusses Borson's poetry as characterized by the
"elegiac" and "nostalgic" and Borson likewise describes herself as living through seven years of
mourning with the deaths of her father and mother. Eric Ormsby, in a more dismissive vein, calls her
"pre-eminently a poet of the present instant" (123) and Nick Giese takes issue with "Borson find[ing]
a possibility of consciousness without human reflection" (293). All of these critiques take a specialized
and specific look at aspects of Borson's work, but none of them take any notice of the Asian and,
specifically, Japanese ecocritical influence and resonances in her work. The Canadian Encyclopedia
concludes its entry on Borson by noting that in 2000 Borson co-published a book of what she called "free
variations" on Classical Chinese poetry, Introduction to the Introduction of Wang Wei (Pain Not Bread)
and that her Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida "is similarly influenced by her interest in Asian
poetry and nature" ("Roo Borson"
<http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ruth-elizabethborson/>). However, in spite of (...truncated)