This is a true story: a poetry editor once told me that as a way
of speeding up the process of sifting through new work he would
give a stack of manuscripts to his secretary, with the instruction
that any poem using a given word should be discarded; one month,
that unfortunate shibboleth was ‘shard(s)’. Unfair? is ‘shards’
a ridiculous word? What is the moral of this story? Callous
and cynical editor deals arbitrarily with the painstaking work
of abused poets, perhaps? Or: poor, put-upon editor acknowledges
the plight of new writers in seeking to efface himself from a
process he knows to be painfully subjective? Or even: poetic diction
has a brief shelflife; once a word has had currency, it must change
itself by ironic or other means, or else risk belatedness and
parody?
It’s embarrassing, at any rate, to come across the word ‘shards’
in Anne Rouse’s poem ‘Skirmish’. The word triggers for me a private
readerly embarrassment, in which I catch something of the troubled
cynicism of the said editor, and something of his cavalier humour
also. There is a problem of diction in this collection; my unproven
allegation is that Anne Rouse lapses on occasion into ‘poetic’
diction. Self-consciously meaningful epithets like ‘neural, giddy,
ecstatic’ are redolent of strain. ‘Skeins’ and ‘caul’ could well
be further evidence. Also ‘fragmentary’; consider these lines
from ‘Blitz’:
‘In ’41 it got so bad
every city morgue was full.
We couldn’t unload our lot,
burned most of ’em, poor
buggers, and fragmentary.
That fifth line of the poem appears to me to switch from hunched,
grimly humorous, salt-of-the-earth wartime Cockney to late 1990s
poet over the space of one comma. Anne Rouse is an American who
has lived in England for a long time; but the attempts here at
English vernacular are horribly strained. I cringe to read ‘Gissa
quid‘ and ‘Yeah, cheers mate’. Dramatic occasion, in either
first or second person narration can likewise be mannered and
stagey: ‘I guard a temple that is bare’; ‘The walkers swerve around
you.’
What is subsequently interesting about the poem ‘Blitz’, however,
is its sense of the body – the deconstituted body-parts shaking
and rattling in improvised lumber-room storage. Materials, stuff.
The body is in sharp focus in many of the poems from Timing;
the body as a thing in process, a thing in motion. In particular,
Rouse has a fine sense of the body’s relationship with time, the
somatic often brushing shoulders with the temporal, (living) corpses
with clocks. The body in Rouse’s poetry registers the uneven
pressures of the moment, measures and is measured by: epiphanies,
shouts, orgasms, haircuts. Its ineluctable decay is read both
with brutality and with tenderness. In a startling poem from
a death, ‘Testament’, Rouse gives voice to a postmortem sensation,
as a woman imagines her own cremation:
My leaving do’s a blast, a whirl,
I’m a party-girl,
Nude and ablaze like a tree,
one spectacular xray.
‘A party-girl’ – wonderful; I wish there was more writing like this
in the collection. The satirical voice in Timing is nothing
like as good; there is some feebly belated satirical poetry here –
on the cult of celebrity, on the use of sex in advertising, on
oversexed but underperforming men. And yet possibly the most
distinctive poem here, ‘Spunk Talking’ (which the backcover blurb
says began life as a performance piece) breaks out of the stagnation
of spent satire with a yawp of joyful, lyrical hooliganism:
Before time began the void revolved, as smooth and bored
as an egg, when a tiny ragged crack appeared,
and the world exploded like an umpire’s shout,
as the primal spunk of the cosmos bellowed OUT.
Like Gillian Ferguson, Anne Rouse contributed poems to Maura Dooley’s
Bloodaxe anthology Making for Planet Alice; unlike Ferguson,
I feel she is still in the process of developing a voice. Timing,
Rouse’s second collection, is uneven and anxious, very much devoted
to the pursuit of voice or voices. None of the ventriloquistic
pieces here seem to me to step out of the poet’s regular lyrical-dramatic
‘I’; yet in this ‘I’ there is much which is received and undistinctive.
Part of the joy of that ‘OUT’ quoted above is that it marks a
moment of escape, a little victory over the more constrained and
constraining style of the collection at large.
Reviewed by Michael Bradshaw
