Transparence of November Snow

by Roo Borson, Kim Maltman

Genres: Poetry

76 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Ruth 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.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Footsteps, snow against the window,
The dog twitches in its sleep. A sound
half snarl, half whimper.
You touch its neck.
A thousand centuries and still
one simple gesture is too huge
to gather in one pair of arms.
You turn your head and the shadows
turn with it, filling with hollows.
Now the dogs ouside sound
far off, crazy, barking at the snow.
They lunge at drifts and come up
shaking nothing, muzzles white with snow,
as if that were enough. And maybe it is,
maybe it is. In the morning
we will go out where the children have been
making angels in the snow and see they have
no heads, no faith, no need of reason.

[Ba · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last part, "Snow" was a bit uneven for me. But the beginning was really beautiful, impressionistic, and Borson slips into very evocative ways of thinking...I'm thinking of the poem of the sun as a sparrow, the poem about the owl, and others. It falls a bit flat for me when it becomes didactic or the message is too sentimental (wild horses) or self-evident, like there is a flatness to the underlying spiritual conceits, everything is reduced to earth, but not in the way Flaubert talked about with the men between Marcus Aurelius and Cicero. But the first sections were really stunning to me and actually I could see so clearly the "student of Gluck"

[Cc · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last part, "Snow" was a bit uneven for me. But the beginning was really beautiful, impressionistic, and Borson slips into very evocative ways of thinking...I'm thinking of the poem of the sun as a sparrow, the poem about the owl, and others. It falls a bit flat for me when it becomes didactic or the message is too sentimental (wild horses) or self-evident, like there is a flatness to the underlying spiritual conceits, everything is reduced to earth, but not in the way Flaubert talked about with the men between Marcus Aurelius and Cicero. But the first sections were really stunning to me and actually I could see so clearly the "student of Gluck"