Anne Rouse’s The Upshot comprises poems from her first three books, presented in reverse order of publication. At the front of the book, there is a group of new poems that she has called ‘The Divided’.

Rouse has always been a miniaturist; her poems seldom stray over the page, and this tendency has become more pronounced with each new book. She hasn’t, until, recently, much strayed onto the big subjects, either; there’s little in the way of God, Gaia, or propaganda in her writing. This has resulted in poetry as netsuke, where intimate dissections of ‘the world’ have been released from the ivory of the quotidian.

In the early books, her experiences as a nurse and a worker in a mental health charity furnished her with material, and there were adroit descriptions of her fellow workers, particularly doctors, whose pretensions were shot down with devastating skill. But there were also neat fictions, such as ‘Success’, reprinted here, in which a wedding turns into gothic horror. And, fleeing from the scene, the narrator ends up in ‘… a room full of bric-a-brac:/Crisp antimacassars, needle-filled housewife,/Brass baby boots and Monarchs in shellac.’ Success in Rouse’s work can be provisional and temporary.

This is true even with the love poems that she’s always written. However, what hangs over so much of her writing and which makes the writing so finally life-affirming, is the sense of forgiveness. In the recent ‘The Verbals’, this forgiveness extends even to herself: ‘Cranky guard of a glass-house,/bluff, or rudeness – once you’d have thought, all this -/but oh my failings, what would I be without you?//Stuck in a fault; pinioned to a sky of stone./ Rouse plays an intricate game with the ‘you’ here, which is undoubtedly ‘her’ as the narrator of the poem, and also the failings, but the ‘you’ is extended out to the reader as well. This is not culpatory, but empathetic – ‘once you’d have thought, all this’.

In a comment in a PBS bulletin, Rouse wrote that, under the influence of Pound’s dictum of ‘Poetry as condensation’, she ‘began to devise poems like Gordian knots, tightened to the point of unintelligibility.’ Rather too hard on herself there! And certainly not the poetics that got her into Paterson and Simic’s defiantly ‘mainstream’ New British Poetry.

What we find in Rouse’s books are poems that vary from the narratives and vignettes, I’ve described above, to lyrics that are tense with both detail and emotion. In ‘Small Thing’ from the front of this new book, Rouse pushes and pulls the participles around their subjects so that the reader is driven into the syntax: ‘Swollen with rain, the great cliff weighs/on bulkheads primed like heavy guns,/tilted across a littering of shells./Free of salt accretions, stasis, a motor-boat/nudges towards the offing, attempting flight.’

Anne Rouse is a poet of real lyric gifts who seems particularly undervalued in this country. These poems are charged, satisfying and exquisitely crafted.
 
Ian Pople

No comments yet.

Leave a Reply