The Whole Night, Coming Home

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

This is Borson’s seventh book, a glossy affair with a beautiful cover photo (from an agency) and a mediocre back-cover one (by a friend). The book is divided into two long cycles, “Flying Low” and “Folklore.”

“Flying Low” consists of 30 poems, most a page or a little longer, about growing up in a suburb of San Francisco. The poet’s use of image is masterful: crickets play “the cracked violins of their bodies,” sheep “stand round like errant clouds.” Recurrent images of cats, jets, and motorcycles lend unity, but more central are themes of connection and alienation, remembering and forgetting. Night is an exile’s book, in which great detail serves in place of existence. The detail convinces, but several poems suffer from sexual stereotyping, and “Rayette” deals equally simplistically with the racial question.

“Folklore” is a series of 35 prose-poems. Whereas some poems in “Flying Low” tend toward prosiness and flat endings, such faults only occasionally mar the second section. Moreover, “Folklore” deals with a specific well-to-do family, and so, unencumbered by such matters as take place in the Big City, Borson’s talent takes flight. Sights, sounds, especially smells are evoked with consummate skill; there is even some humour, very welcome in the overall seriousness. Night is a very good book, but perhaps it has been published too quickly. The richness of the sensual, the detail, and the density of image make it a book best savoured in small amounts, like a fine wine.