Personal History

Personal History is a book consisting of eight essays in the belles lettres tradition. Of the work, Borson writes: "From the inside, each life seems an unbounded world; from the outside, a design can at times be seen. Just as repetition and variation form the heart of poetry and song, so too the seemingly singular events and questions that arise within a given life are echoed or "answered," recurring, most often more than once, in another time and place, sometimes another key.

This idea underlies the eight pieces comprising this collection. Two begin from the standpoint of reading and writing, two from painting, two from particular places or "garden­scapes," and two from aspects of personal history and memory, but all of these elements and standpoints revolve throughout, interlinking the essays in an exploration of the adjacent regions of life and art."

Roo Borson was drawn to the fine arts (and poetry in particular) from a very early age and this prose companion, rooted in the immediacy of experience and anti­didactic in bent, is dedicated to the idea that down the decades a book, or an image, however recorded, might fall now and again into the right hands.

Jan Zwicky is a philosopher and poet. She has won the Governor General s Award for poetry, the Dorothy Livesay Award, and has been shortlisted for the Griffin Prize for Poetry. In 2004, "Wisdom & Metaphor" was shortlisted for the Governor General s Award for nonfiction.