An Unzipped Mouse: Grotesque Imagery in the Poetry of Roo Borson

By the word grottesco the Renaissance […] understood not only something playfully gay and carelessly fantastic, but also something ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally different from the familiar one—a world in which the realm of inanimate things is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human beings.   

       — Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1966)

While Roo Borson has enjoyed much acclaim from early in her career, some critics have inevitably expressed reservations about her work. After noting Borson’s observant eye and her deft handling of free verse, Canadian poet Patience Wheatley added, “If there is any criticism of Borson’s poetry, it might be that it is too beautiful, too cloying, perfect, and unreal.” In a much more critical piece, the poet and scholar Professor Eric Ormsby claimed that Borson’s poetry is focused on happiness, transience, and spontaneity, which sometimes results in “sugary solipsism.” He also accused her of creating, “deliberately clashing metaphors, as if to assert the rights of simultaneity in the teeth of logic.” Except on the issue of sweetness, these two criticisms seem rather contradictory. The notion that Borson’s poetry is sometimes too beautiful sits uneasily beside the contention that it is illogical, discordant, and solipsistic. Although both Ormsby and Wheatley engaged deeply with Borson’s poetry, neither critic acknowledged Borson’s extensive engagement with the grotesque. This points to the larger issue that Borson’s body of work is highly divergent and multitudinous indeed, much more so than most of her reviewers have recognised. Borson scholarship will not be on a sure footing until it is appreciated that she has written poetry in a wide range of aesthetic categories.

In a companion piece to this essay, I argued that Rain, Borson’s book-length poem from 1980, synthesised the sublime with the modern lyrical sequence. However, it would be no more accurate to describe her as a poet of the sublime than to refer to her as a “nature poet” or “a poet of beauty.” Borson moves between a number of modes, including the beautiful, the sublime, and (least acknowledged of all) the grotesque. It is peculiar that Borson’s extensive engagement with the grotesque has been so utterly ignored by reviewers, but therein lies an opportunity. By accepting her interest in ominous and disconcerting imagery, we can abandon the limiting misreading that Borson is “merely” a poet of beauty. With this in mind, readers can turn their attention to the sizable number of Borson poems which deal with pain, injury, decay, and death. These are not, as Ormsby implies, failed attempts at latching onto happiness but, as we shall see, examples of what John Ruskin, the renowned English art critic, termed “the noble grotesque” artworks which foreground the disturbing aspects of nature and our subjective awareness of it. In other poems, Borson uses the grotesque to reveal the estranging qualities of modern urban life. This essay will explore a variety of significant poems—all of them published in the 1980s—with the goal of illustrating Borson’s widespread deployment of the grotesque and teasing out the purposes to which it is used.

Arguably, Borson’s interest in the grotesque predates her exploration of the sublime. “Blue,” her first estimable poem of the category, comes from her second collection, In the Smoky Light of the Fields. This tormented and insomniac poem is the perfect ground on which to introduce Borson’s aesthetics of the grotesque, for it is a poem overflowing with intrusions, disruptions, cleavages and unnerving displacements. Its first stanza showcases her remarkable facility in this difficult mode:

As I lay down to sleep

the pines stuck blackly up

like quills in a dog’s lip

in the blue chasm of evening

and flowers withdrew

back of themselves like people interrogated.

Like big sad animals caged.

“Blue” opens with the outlandish figure of a forest “stuck blackly up / like quills in a dog’s lip.” What we see here is a pervasive sense of intrusion, which affects even the syntax. Notice how the phrasal verb “stuck up” has the striking adverb “blackly” inserted into the middle of it, which parallels the way that porcupine quills have pierced the dog’s lip, presumably during an attack. More subtly, this links to the act of writing, which was traditionally done with another sort of quill. A sense of unease is even conveyed at the phonemic level: there is a preponderance of harsh “stop” sounds, especially “b,” “k,” and “p”, which disturb the flow of air. The threat of violence intrudes early and strongly in the poem, lending the poem a sinister air. Consider also the poem’s title, “Blue”. In the poem’s fourth line, it attaches to the word “chasm”, which implies a great cleft or severance in being.

The next figure is, if anything, even more suggestive of the grotesque, dissolving the boundaries between plant, human, and animal; in their withdrawal, the flowers resemble both interrogation subjects and zoo animals. In his classic book on the history of the grotesque, the German theorist Wolfgang Kayser explains that in the Renaissance, the word grottesco suggested a dissolution of boundaries between categories, especially plants, animals, and humans. Later, Kayser discusses the fantastical prints of Edward Lear, the English illustrator and poet, in which plant and animal forms merge. An example is Piggiawiggia Pyramidalis, a slender plant with pigs for blossoms. Similar but more sinister transformations are ubiquitous in “Blue”: pine trees become porcupine quills; flowers become people and then animals; and trousers twist like a victim on the rack. It is easy to see how Ormsby might have detected “clashing metaphors” in imagery like this, but if we center our analysis on the grotesque, we can recognize that Borson’s goal is not a verisimilitudinous representation of the external world but the depiction of a mind intuiting physical and psychological disintegration. This point is equally clear in the depiction of the apartment, which dominates the second half of the poem.

In the second stanza, the poet grotesquely represents her apartment as a kind of torture chamber, a fact reinforced the litany of past participle verbs depicting physical pain (“twisted”, “hung”) or mental disorientation (“confused’). Working in conjunction with “interrogated” and “caged” from the first stanza, these words create a sense of entrapment and dread. In the grotesque vision of “Blue”, Borson’s Toronto apartment has become a prison camp, haunted by the inevitability of death. Yet she also shows us the defences which she marshals against the grotesque and deathly. Mothballs are deployed against the predations of moths and silverfish, showing a mind perturbed about decay. The “teeth collected in the bureau drawers” are an even more macabre addition, but they could also be understood as a talisman against the forces of disease and deterioration. Yet none of these defences are particularly effective. Even the return of childhood memories carries hints of decomposition; they “come back imperfectly,” like a faded photograph. In other words, many of the seemingly “random” and “illogical” images in Borson are actually united by anxieties about sickness, decay, and death. After all, the consciousness that is sensitive to the beautiful and sublime in nature will also be alert to its fearful aspects, including the eventual dissolution of the flesh. A grotesque antipode to her numerous poems about the beauty of the natural world, “Blue” achieves a significant expansion of Borson’s imaginative parameters.

This point is explored by Ernst Derwood Lee Jr. in his dissertation, The Grotesque in the Poetry of William Wordsworth (1986). He found in some passages of Wordsworth’s work, “subtle grotesque patterns characterized by fearful images which suggest death, decay, waste, and abnormality.” For Lee Jr., Wordsworth’s poems demonstrated that “he is affected not just by beauty but also by fear as he imaginatively perceives his world.” This is an analysis which we can fruitfully apply to Borson’s “Blue”. Her “blue chasm of evening” is a zone characterised by injury, decay, and death. Far from being an exercise in solipsism, much less a quest for the beautiful or “unreal,” “Blue” is an example of what Ruskin memorably termed “the noble grotesque”— a grotesque that expresses a truth the artist would have struggled to convey in plainspoken language. As he says in Volume III of Modern Painters (1863):

The third form of the Grotesque is a thoroughly noble one. It is that which arises out of the use or fancy of tangible signs to set forth an otherwise less expressible truth; including nearly the whole range of symbolical and allegorical poetry.

In “Blue,” Borson creates a “noble grotesque,” one which expresses visceral fears about confinement, illness, and injury. Due to the nightmarish quality of the poem, the reader may well surmise that these fears are subliminal. Though Ormsby is an unreliable guide to Borson generally, there is value in his contention that Borson’s poems exist “in the elusive penumbra between the conscious and the unconscious mind.” Intriguingly, when I asked Borson if she had ever used “jarring or unpleasant imagery” in her poems, she replied, “Not intentionally.” However, throughout the 1980s she produced quite a number of poems that employed dark or disturbing imagery, which suggests that these images were welling up subliminally. Yet, if Ormsby is correct about the unconscious wellsprings of Borson’s imagery, he badly misreads its import. Borson’s unsettling poems should not be read as poetic caprices or fancies; they are not the products of a mind obsessively focused on happiness. On the contrary, they are most often “noble grotesques,” poems which perceive the disquieting aspects of the natural world and human society.

It is equally certain that “Blue” is not an anomalous work, an aberration in an otherwise naturalistic oeuvre. In Borson’s early collections, there are numerous poems which use dark or unsettling imagery. In her fourth collection, A Sad Device (1981), she makes frequent excursions into the realm of the grotesque, including, but not limited to, “Shapes,”  “At Kensington Market,” “October,” “Hanson’s Field,” and the title poem, “A Sad Device.” However, the poem I will discuss first is “Scarecrow,” an unacknowledged classic of the Canadian grotesque. Though it is arranged in a single stanza, it falls into two movements, the first of which is a subtly grotesque evocation of nature. It begins thus:

Three hours I walked in the fields.

Dandelions that only last week exploded

like the yellow eyes of a million madmen had turned

to full hazy moons in the grass, waning.

Characteristically of Borson’s poetry of the grotesque, “Scarecrow” dissolves boundaries between plants, animals, humans, and inanimate objects. Just like in “Blue,” things have a protean quality: the dandelions turn to madmen but then metamorphose again into “full hazy moons, waning.” Later, the redwing blackbirds are first daggers and then assassins hiding among the leaves. Once again, the reader recalls Ormsby’s charge of “clashing metaphors” but there is something which unites all this inventive simile-making, and it’s there in the opening phrase of the poem: “three hours.” This is a poem about time and mutability, and Borson uses syntax and punctuation to emphasise the fact. Note the way “three hours” is front-loaded in the first sentence, giving it an unusual salience. Another time expression, “only last week,” interjects between subject and verb in the second line. In the fourth line, the word “moon” is a further reminder of the cycles of time, and it is promptly followed by the subtly grotesque “waning,” which brings intimations of decay and dissolution. Haunted by time and change, “Scarecrow” is a poem that trembles with the foreknowledge of death. Though the “surface of the water” is placid and beautiful, it is shivered by “soft whips”—a painful awareness that the season of plenty is on the wane. In the final sentence, she seeks out a metaphor for the “true shape of man,” settling on the scarecrow.

                                       Or maybe his real form

is a mismatched suit

stuffed with straw, a helpless thing

overseeing a field of dying stubble,

in a shape that thinks

it can scare away birds.

Why is the scarecrow the real form of humankind? What Borson emphasizes is the uselessness of the scarecrow—its ineffectiveness in scaring away marauders, and its inability to forestall death. In other words, the scarecrow is the true form of the poet of the grotesque. Like the scarecrow, Borson perceives the processes of decay but is utterly powerless to arrest them. In this, her thinking parallels that of poet Emily Dickinson, who claimed, “This Consciousness that is aware / Of Neighbors and the Sun / Will be the one aware of Death.” Yet the comparison with Dickinson can also help us to appreciate the uniqueness of Borson’s poetic stance. Whereas Dickinson’s poem is inward and meditative, “Scarecrow” faces outward to the natural world, and the knowledge of death is more covert than explicit. It is, so to speak, “concealed among the leaves.” To receive it, the reader needs to pay attention to the patterns and obsessions of the imagery, for it is there that an ominous presence intrudes.

What these two examples illustrate is the importance of the grotesque in Borson’s art. Her frequent engagement with the category should dispel the notion that she is narrowly focused on joy and beauty. Ormsby may claim that “she is a poet who wishes to seize the happiness of the instant in its flight,” but this is a reading which widely misses the mark. As already illustrated, Borson uses the grotesque to obliquely portray the frightening aspects of life. However, there is another purpose to which she deploys the category. In a number of poems, the grotesque is used to depict a sense of displacement and alienation. This feeling is most often engendered by city environments, especially those characterised by harsh lighting, urban light, and scenes of abject human misery. These poems recall the famous aphorism of Kayser, “The grotesque is the estranged world.” In these poems, Borson implies that urban life is alienating and disturbing, inimical to our primordial selves. A notable example is “Shapes,” which offers an unsettling depiction of a winter’s evening in a large, Canadian city.

Depots smelling like the holes in old shoes.

The starlight trance of refrigerators

in a thousand apartments like so many ice cubes.

Under a streetlight a cat unzips a mouse’s belly.

A man lying in the snow like a broken bag of groceries.

While there is either a simile or a metaphor in every line of this passage, they are interconnected in revealing ways. For example, the coldness of the apartments is subtly suggested by both the reference to “refrigerators” and the comparison of the apartments to “so many ice cubes.” These chilly associations cohere with “snow” in the final line, forming a link between indoors and outdoors environments. This imagery shows us that the city is a cold place in at least two senses of the word: the boxy, identical apartments are figuratively cold, in the sense of being unwelcoming and impersonal, and the city outside is literally freezing, which is a source of untold suffering for the homeless. The inside and outside are also linked by an imagery of light; the artificial light of the refrigerators is mirrored in the clinical streetlamps, which illuminate an alley cat’s vivisection of a mouse. Alongside this extensive use of parallelism, Borson engages in the dissolution of categories, which is one of the hallmarks of the grotesque.

In the final two lines of the excerpt, Borson blurs the distinction between humans, animals, and commodities. The suffering of the “unzipped” mouse imminently presages the misery of the homeless man, who is grotesquely compared to “a broken bag of groceries.” This richly assonant and alliterative phrase draws our attention to the commodification of human life, implying that cities reduce everything to its economic value, a process which is inherently dispiriting and dehumanizing. Whether it is the interchangeable apartments or the broken bodies in the snow, the poem focuses on the erosion of individuality and dignity, until everything is just a mass of “shapes.” In other words, Borson uses the grotesque to highlight our estrangement from nature and each other. She asserts the importance of humanistic values and shows how these are eroded by the cold, competitive values of city life.

Borson’s urban grotesques—a subset of poems including “Blue” and “Shapes”—were the result of the poet’s move to Toronto. After getting her Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Borson moved to Toronto with her partner, Kim Maltman, the poet and particle physicist. Though Vancouver was certainly not a small city, it was surrounded by the rainforest, so Borson, a keen hiker and environmentalist, could easily make excursions to natural places. In her 1980 collection, Rain, Borson memorably depicts the islands, forests, and mountains of the Vancouver hinterland. However, Toronto was much larger than the previous cities she had called home, making the transition difficult to deal with. When asked about the move to Toronto, she said, “It was terribly hard to adjust. Finally, I just began to focus on small things: grass blades, individual trees, flowers etc., and that’s how I acclimatized.” It may well have been the unfamiliar and unnatural environment of Toronto which resulted in Borson writing a large number of grotesques for A Sad Device. What these poems share is a sense of being out-of-place, of disconnection from the natural world. An emblematic example is “At Kensington Market,” the setting of which is a bohemian area in downtown Toronto. However, the imagery immediately engenders a sense of unease. In trying to describe grapes at a fruit stall, Borson reels from one metaphor to the next, as if engaged in a desperate and doomed attempt to escape from subliminal associations of violence, death, and failure. 

Bunches of grapes drape over one another,

heaped bodies, lost causes.

They glow, violet marbled with green,

and the bees dance over them

like boxers in a ring.

They are nipples engorging before your eyes.

They are eyes.

In the first stanza, the grapes take on the sinister appearance of “heaped bodies,” like victims of a massacre, dumped in a mass grave. This is the first of many grotesque displacements which Borson includes in this short lyric. The poem’s second metaphor compares the grapes to “lost causes,” bringing a sense of doomed idealism. In the second stanza, the grapes regain a fruit-like semblance, but a sense of indeterminacy remains. The grapes are variegated, meaning their violetness is compromised by hints of green. And though the grapes are no longer human-like, the bees assume human characteristics instead, with the phrase “boxers in a ring” bringing renewed suggestions of violence. In the third stanza, the grapes regain anthropomorphic qualities, but alarmingly, they are no longer depicted as whole bodies but parts thereof—first nipples and then eyes. The concept of the grapes becoming “eyes” is especially grotesque because it reverses the traditional distinction between poet and subject. At this point, it is as if the grapes (Borson’s ostensible subject matter) seem to look back at her. This association of the grapes and eyes is strangely appropriate because it was the fruit that has permitted Borson to see inwardly, revealing a mind which is estranged from its environment. Just like the fruit in Kensington Market, Borson feels separated from her natural habitat, and it is this original displacement from which all the others flow. 

While grotesques, both urban and pastoral, are probably most abundant in A Sad Device, they are also relatively common in Borson’s mournful 1989 collection, Intent: or the Weight of the World. Noteworthy entries in the category include “Chitons,” “Rubber Boots,” and “House,” all of which possess the eerie, unsettling quality which typifies the category. These are poems in which the poet, better known for her engagement with the external world, exhibits a negative or ambivalent response to objects and places you would expect her to relish: a cephalopod washed up on a beach; a well-worn pair of gumboots; and a childhood home, the haunt of moths and albino spiders. What makes these poems rewarding is precisely the unease they engender, the sense of something being uncannily out of place. But intriguing as these poems are, the collection’s most undeniable poem of the grotesque is “Save Us From,” which has proven a great favourite among poetry readers and bloggers. It is also something of an “odd one out” among Borson’s poems of the grotesque. In terms of style and perspective, it bears little resemblance to the other works discussed in this essay.

To recap, Borson’s archetypal poem of the grotesque is a short lyric containing unnerving and unsettling imagery. In the typical case, her poetry of the grotesque is the result of an aversive psychological experience—most often the awareness of decay or moribundity in nature, or the recognition of the harsh unnaturalness of urban environments. These poems are usually rendered in the first-person voice, and even when the pronoun “I” is absent, we assume that the scene is described by a hidden first-person subject. Furthermore, Borson usually employs short sentences in these poems, as if processing the estranged world, one image or thought at a time. However, in “Save Us From,” she adopts a radically different approach. The poem uses an incantatory style which brings to mind Christopher Smart, Williams Blake, and Walt Whitman—poets who were heavily influenced by the Hebrew poetic tradition. Needless to say, this is not Borson’s home turf, and her adoption of such atypical style is a strong hint that she is offering a new poetic stance on the grotesque. As many readers have commented, the poem is best understood as a prayer for salvation, a plea to be saved from the horrors of the modern world. If the overwhelming majority of Borson’s poetry is secular in orientation, “Save Us From” is daringly religious, at least in its style, using anaphora in a manner redolent of the Book of Psalms, though probably mediated through its nineteenth-century and twentieth-century revisionists. 

In terms of construction, it is a Russian doll of a poem, consisting of three sentences, each one half the size of the one before. While the first sentence is epic, extending to twenty-four lines, the second (reproduced below) clocks in at twelve sentences, and the final sentence is a comparatively succinct six lines. The sprawling first sentence enables Borson to catalogue many of the dispiriting and unnatural aspects of modern life, incorporating everything from gas stations to ghastly “test tube” hues. In short, “Save Us From” is the poet’s most expansive and encompassing vision of the ugliness of urban life, with the saving grace of her gentle, supplicatory spirit.

Save us from insomnia,
its treadmill,
its school bells and factory bells,
from living rooms like the tomb,
their plaid chesterfields
and galaxies of dust,
from chairs without arms,
from any matched set of furniture,
from floor-length drapes which
close out the world,
from padded bras and rented suits,
from any object in which horror is concealed.

This beautiful passage revisits some of the elements we encountered in her early poems of the grotesque: the deep sense of fatigue which permeated “Blue”; the deathly living spaces of “Shapes”; and “Scarecrow’s” interest in concealed horror. But we will readily observe that much has changed as well. For one thing, she has shifted from the subject pronoun “I” to the inclusive object pronoun “us.” Combined with the appeal to a higher power, this shift marks the adoption of a broader, or even panoramic, perspective. And what does the world look like when viewed from above? Firstly, she perceives herself as one of a multitude—the teeming millions of the modern city—all of whom are dispirited by gruelling schedules and grotesquely unnatural conditions. Secondly, she sees city-dwellers as the prisoners of objects, the tawdry bric-a-brac of modern life. Borson’s catalogue of dreary objects (chesterfields, chairs, drapes, bras, suits) suggests that people lose perspective in cities, eventually regarding themselves as just another item of furniture or clothing. And to convey the magnitude of this insight, she adopts the prophetic voice, successfully appropriating the prophetic voice of D.H, Lawrence and Whitman. The effect is singular enough to invite speculation.

By the time Borson published “Save Us From,” she had been exploring the grotesque for a decade. Yet her poems in this category are mostly rather subtle, meaning their grotesque elements remained largely unnoticed, possibly even to Borson herself. The reader of a poem like “Scarecrow” could easily read it as a typical free verse pastoral, overlooking the grotesque elements. But with “Save Us From,” something important shifts. The grotesque elements are no longer lurking in the penumbra of the subconscious; Borson has brought them to full consciousness. As already mentioned, Borson signals the significance of this development with dramatic shifts in perspective, vocabulary, and sentence structure, all of which show a pronounced religious influence. By becoming fully aware of the grotesqueness of modern life, Borson finally sees what needs to be done: she switches to an incantatory mode, figuratively calling on supernatural assistance to exorcise the demon of the grotesque. On first using this phrase, I wondered if this wasn’t too fanciful a figure, but I subsequently discovered a passage in Kayser which seems to capture a very similar idea. It is worth quoting in full, because it captures the essence of “Save Us From”:

The darkness has been sighted, the ominous powers discovered, the incomprehensible forces challenged. And thus we arrive at a final interpretation of the grotesque: an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world.

Borson’s undeniable facility for beautiful imagery has sometimes distorted perceptions of her poetry. While she is a leading poet of natural beauty, her poetry is reducible to neither beauty nor happiness. A better starting point is an understanding that Borson is a contemporary poet whose deepest roots are in the British Romantic and American Transcendentalist traditions. On the surface, her poetry bears little resemblance to that of John Keats, Wordsworth and Dickinson. Nevertheless, the categories of Romantic and Transcendentalist poetry—especially the beautiful, the sublime, and the grotesque—are invaluable in analysing her work. 

Reviewers who fail to recognize the grotesque aspects of her poetics have tended to characterise it in limiting ways, either ignoring Borson’s unsettling poems entirely or misreading them as failed attempts at depicting joy. By turning our attention to Borson’s grotesque creations, we can gain a more balanced view of her poetry. Like her High Romantic precursors, Borson is a poet of both beauty and terror; fittingly, she discerns the latter in both natural and artificial environments. Though she is keenly attuned to natural beauty, she is also a poet of uneasiness and estrangement. In poems like “Blue,” “Scarecrow,” and “Save Us From,” Borson’s investigations of the grotesque resulted in some of the finest poems from her early collections. To properly evaluate her work, it is necessary to assimilate an understanding of its darker and more disturbing undercurrents.