I’ve fallen into a new routine lately of getting up very early and reading poetry. Darkness, a cup of tea, a quiet house and a thin book. Reading three or four poems concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Most recently, I’ve finished a lovely collection, Roo Borson’s Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar,a meditation on mortality. Borson writes about insects, flowers, civilizations, people; oneself. Some of the poems are transient, some incantory, like One.

Every Tuesday at 4 p.m.

he would come to me, one

of the company of the dead, familiar,

only now in Montreal, in winter;

it would be snowing wonderfully;

I would order a coffee and a sandwich;

but it had to be a Tuesday,

and at 4 p.m., and Montreal,

and then, and only then,

he’d come to me.

I started publishing my first short stories in the same small literary magazines at the same time as Roo Borson, although I didn’t know her then, and I don’t know her well now. But I have followed her career from the time we were young to this lovely autumnal book, when she writes of

Having to state my occupation

for the official issuing visas

just another tousle-haired old poet

Along the way, she has published fourteen books of poetry, including this one, and won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

And now, here she is, and here the two of us are, walking consciously with death. We have it as a companion from birth, of course, and there were times when I was young when I grew obsessive about it, and could be terrified. Now, for me, it’s a more modulated awareness: being conscious of the shadows as well as whatever casts them.

Or maybe like the extended time this winter when I had a bad cold, and I would walk home at night on the snow-covered sidewalk and keep turning because I thought I heard footsteps behind me, someone eerily keeping my exact pace. No one was ever there. I was hearing my own footsteps echoing back through an infected ear, and being ill and older, it made me think each time of loss and being lost to the world. Mortality had become something audibly following me, walking just a little behind, maybe a little frightening still, but also almost not.

In Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar, Borson and her work travel from Europe to Australia to Canada, with some of the poems set in Toronto in and near the Cedarvale Ravine close to her house. Throughout, she remains conscious of what are usually called insignificant things, which she makes large, including the “small horse walking out of a flower…mayfly or June bug,” asking it in her incantory way,

Why do you walk toward me out of a flower

at this late hour?

The hour is often late in this collection, yet there’s nothing downbeat about it. The poems are too in love with life for that, even as they remain focused on transience. Maybe that’s an oxymoron, but it’s true: the collection is a series of long looks at things that are only fleetingly here.

What I like in books and film is a poet, novelist or filmmaker saying to me, This is what it’s like. I don’t care what this is, as long as it’s closely and intelligently regarded. And Roo Borson’s this is very deeply observed, in this book as in her previous work.

In her collection from 2004, Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida—which I particularly admire—the mood is liminal. In this case, she explores what it’s like to be on the edge of something but not quite there. In a poem called Garden, she writes

Autumn passes by, still speaking

with an older accent,

Like my teacher’s—

Earlier in that same poem, she says

Say goodbye to bye to bye to—what?

Birds in the cedar,

which I’ve never seen.

In her new collection, autumn doesn’t speak in an older accent but the poet’s own, and she has now seen the cardinal in the eastern white cedar.

A lovely book, to read as you will, although I recommend taking it up in the pre-dawn darkness and reading three or four poems at a time. I hope Roo will excuse me for quoting one I particularly admire in its entirety.

The Varying Hare.

As spring insinuates all things into being,

reed, blossom, the early starling’s coat of many colours,

and with snow and rain in equal measure, so

summer will come with horse-headed clouds,

the golden legs of the wasp, and creeping jenny

bees look into as into the leaves of a living book.

Such summers’ evenings’ city lights reprise

in sequence something of the starling’s speckled coat,

which darkens into autumn. Autumn, which adores

the varying hare, the wooden maps and silver

forests wherein winters yet to come prepare

all things to be unmade: the horse as the horse chestnut,

the harebell as the hare—till one dry stalk

sloughs off its snow. So ends, at least, this world of thought.

 

Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar by Roo Borson is published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart. It’s available here.