Let’s scatter our words…
by Boris Pasternak

My friend, you will ask, who ordains
that the speech of a blessed fool should burn?

Let’s scatter our words
As the garden scatters amber zest,
Absentmindedly and generously
Bit by bit by bit.

Let’s not discuss
Why the leaves are patterned
So formally
With ruby and lemon.

Who welled up with needles
And gushed through the slats,
The floodgate blinds,
Onto the music books in the shelf.

Who dyed the outdoor mat
With rowan berries
Like a canvas of diaphanous,
Trembling italics.

You will ask, who ordains
That August should be great,
For whom is nothing too small,
Who is absorbed with etching

A maple leaf
And who, from the time of Ecclesiastes,
Hasn’t quit his post
Hewing alabaster?

You will ask, who ordains
That the September lips
Of asters and dahlias should suffer?
That the fine leaves of broom
Should waft from greying caryatids
Onto the damp flagstones
Of autumn hospitals?

You will ask, who ordains?
– The all-powerful God of details,
The all-powerful God of love,
Of Jagailos and Jadwigas.

I don’t know if the dark riddle
Of the tomb has been solved;
But life, like autumn
Silence, is in the details.

There seems to be a major disconnect taking place here.

Because is it possible to imagine two more mutually exclusionary representations of both a country and a land mass?

The one on the left from outside Canada, and specifically from the United States.

And the one on the right from inside Canada, as a country whose sense of “identity” has, since the end of the American Revolution in 1783, been based largely on distinguishing itself from the much more populous, powerful, and frequently expansionist nation state to the south.

This does seem a bit ridiculous.

As well as a little ominous, given that the map on the right seems also to suggest Canada’s own potential isolation in the world, and an implicit answer to the cover question, with this added emphasis: “WOULD ANYONE NOTICE IF CANADA DISAPPEARED?”

Especially when an ad designer / mapmaker in Canada thought there would be appeal, within Canada, to representing the rest of the world as “THE OCEAN”.

During the course of clearing out Woodrow’s three-bedroom house in March, 2001, his brother Saul sent a box of 100 books to an antique bookshop, and unknowingly included several in which Woodrow had painted over the pages. The owner, Richard Axe, intrigued at the bold, colourful illustrations, contacted an artist friend, who called Andrew Stewart, owner of the 108 gallery.

The following day an excited Stewart visited Woodrow’s home to investigate further, and was so impressed that he took away 60 pieces for restoration. After they were restored a year later, a small exhibition was staged to introduce the world to Joash Woodrow.