Water Memory

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the author of Calling Texas and Earth Prime.

Never very adventurous formally, Roo Borson writes low-key lyrics about
such traditional themes as grief, love, joy, and melancholy. She works
well in a free-verse poetry, but without the formal tensions that we
find in the lyrics of writers like Louise Bogan or Anne Marriot. The
prose-poems—her only attempts to revitalize the poetic medium—do not
generate much excitement either. In one poem, for example, we learn how
beet salad is made in a kind of recipe that ends, “And someday I may
tell you, if I know / how I came to these words and this place, / with
the house to myself, and sunset, / eating flamingo pink, and reading.”
This hardly seems enough for poetry. The book contains some touching
elegies for the poet’s mother, but the most interesting poems are
about other poets (Du Fu, Wang Wei, and Lorca). Borson’s graceful
talent is clear, but she needs to set herself some challenges. It is not
really enough to assemble a group of safe poems: in poetry, adequacy is
inadequate.