Anne Rouse

It is possible to see Anne Rouse’s first volume, Sunset Grill, as coming on the heels of the narrative poems that were somewhat commonplace in British poetry in the 1980s and early 1990s. Both Sunset Grill and Rouse’s second book, Timing, contained a number of narratives, some of the more renowned of which were monologues: a secretary’s retirement speech in ‘Her Retirement,’; a ‘lager-lout’ in ‘England Nil.’ And there are other poems which portray a range of ‘types,’ in carefully depicted situations.

Sarah Maguire, Maura Dooley, Deryn Rees-Jones and Carol Rumens, Rouse’s editor in Rumens’ New Women Poets are all quoted on the backs of Rouse’s two early books. And other early responses to those books may be somewhat gendered. James Woods in a portmanteau review of a number of titles in the LRB described Rouse’s writing as ‘civil and efficient.’ Ian Sansom in the TLS lit on Rouse’s use of personas in that first book suggesting that it can be ‘claustrophobic, depressing and, at times, dull.’ However, Sansom does comment that Rouse has ‘a characteristic generosity of spirit … for whom poetry is, simply, an act of sympathy, an attempt to create what she calls, “a commonality of spirit.”’ Rather less sympathetically, Sansom views Rouse’s portrayal of a ‘lager lout,’ as resorting to ‘worn-out 1980’s stereotypes’ about which Rouse writes ‘unimaginatively.’

In a note on Sunset Grill, Rouse, herself, commented that ‘whether they describe a football hooligan, a cicada, or a secretary’s retirement, poems need to be driven from within. Lacking a strong psychological impetus, however murky, poems become mere doodling, practice for the real thing.’ What is interesting here are those two slightly parenthetical remarks, that the psychological impetus might be ‘however murky.’ Also, that the poems without that impetus are then ‘practice for the real thing.’ These caveats might suggest that Rouse could see at this stage in her career, that the misfire would always be possible; that the poet’s attempt to empathize might have its limits. Neil Powell, quoted on the back cover of Sunset Grill, also focuses on Rouse’s sympathies. Like Sansom, Powell comments on the poem ‘England Nil’ with its ‘Shakespearian sympathy with a thoroughly unlovely speaker.’ Elsewhere, the back cover of that book quotes Sarah Maguire uses the word ‘ironic’ that is often coupled with the word ‘sardonic,’ to describe these earlier poems.

There is, here, a slightly unresolved tension here between Rouse’s wish to have a strong psychological impetus and the sense of the sardonic and ironic that many perceive in her writing. This would be a tension between the empathy driving the psychology and the distance driving the irony. In that note on Sunset Grill quoted above, Rouse also commented that ‘the effect aimed for in writing, I believe, should be a chemical one: not the formula or record of an explosion, but the explosion itself. Achieving this is rarely a straightforward business … After some while it becomes clear that the poem, or rather the poet, has failed, and that further tinkering won’t help.’ Again, it is simply possible that the early poet, when called upon to comment on the poetry, reaches for a metaphor like ‘explosion’ when something slightly more subdued would be more useful. In all of this, we can get a clear sense that Rouse is working towards an empathy that might reveal in an epiphanic way, which might be a rather more useful idea than the idea of explosion.

Another layer on these psychological processes is that analyzed by Melanie Petch in her chapter ‘The mid-Atlantic imagination: Mina Loy, Ruth Fainlight, Anne Stevenson, Anne Rouse and Eva Salzman’ in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women's Poetry (2011). For Petch, these poets use, ‘the mid-Atlantic imagination … [to] satirise its own and its adopted lands; it plays with being an insider and outsider, sometimes through female-specific perspectives and symbols, and it meddles with American experimental/British formal polarities.’ Such an imagination in Rouse might account for that reaching towards empathies, coupled with the standing back that irony creates. To be both the ‘insider and outsider,’ in Petch’s terms is demand a lot of the creative writer; particularly when, Petch suggests, that imagination is used both for satire and for play, ideas which may both overlap but also demand different strategies. Satire, for example, might require both close attention to what can be satirized, but also that distancing that Petch adduces in order to undermine. ‘Play’, however, might ask for a closer engagement from the writer in which the writer uses the matter engaged with and then works with that material in a lighter fashion. For the fiction writer, this being both inside and outside is the staple of that ‘impetus’ to create, but for the poet, particularly a poet like Rouse, for whom Pound’s maxim that poetry is condensation that impetus will need, to mix the metaphor, to be honed. That honing, Rouse admits led her ‘to devise poems like Gordian knots, tightened to the point of unintelligibility.’ And Petch quotes Rouse telling her that ‘poems occasionally failed to breathe and had to be discarded.’

What all this seems to reveal about Rouse is the nature of her ambition. This is an ambition of the very highest order because it aspires to be both with the Other, and to stand outside them, perhaps in ways that, today, we would consider as a way to refuse appropriation. At the same time, Rouse the maker demands of herself a focus and control that, as she admits, might lead to a breathlessness, not only in the writing but also in those with whom she attempts to empathize. Here, ‘breathlessness,’ is not simply the technical sense of text being overly condensed and therefore costive. The ‘breathlessness’ of the character is to refuse them agency, or a sense of being that is, in some way, distanced from their creator. There is a further irony here in the way that Petch comments that ‘we witness “in-betweenness” as a frequently constructed as a superior stance and always a creatively productive condition.’ At the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century that ‘a superior stance’ sounds perilously close to appropriation when that text does set out to write the lives of Others. In Petch’s defense, her whole thesis is that the women writers she has chosen to write about, adopt those ‘female-specific perspectives and symbols’ and that this kind of feminism hadn’t at that time been through the kinds of turmoil that are, perhaps, current.

The opening sequence of Sunset Grill, ‘A North London Planetary System,’ perhaps illustrates a number of the points made above. Its nine sections are named and ordered after the planets in the solar system. And each poem chooses a London character who is an ‘equivalent’ to the planet. This is the whole of ‘Neptune in Finsbury Park’

He’s been a hand

On every sea,

Navvied in ports.

The gulls winter

Down the estuary.

He stumps the inland course

Of hostels and DSS,

Missing the dawns

And the absence of people,

His uphill walk

Too stiff for pity;

His wants shrunk

To an infallible kit.

There is something both a little obvious and a little bathetic about a poem that clearly describes ‘an old salt,’ as Neptune, named after the god of the sea, particularly as that god has fallen on hard times. And Rouse begins the poem with a generalization about the subject and his work record. The focus then shifts to the concrete world outside the ex-sailor and very outside it is too, with the gulls wintering ‘down the estuary.’ The coldness of the world of the gulls appears to have its analogy in lines five to eight of the poem, with the subject maneuvering his way between the rootlessness of hostels and his dependence on social security. Rouse then suggests a relationship between the man and perceptions of the man, between his stiff walk and the discarding of any pity that might be directed towards the man. Finally, the poet suggests that the man’s needs are held in his kitbag. This kind of poem inevitably flirts with the danger in its need to empathise and suggest an inner world for its subject, and the possibility that those strategies both appropriate and patronize.

The ‘A North London Planetary System,’ is actually reprised in Rouse’s 2008 collection The Upshot. Entitled ‘Distance from the Sun,’ it is as though Rouse is revisiting the characters fifteen years later. It’s as though the characters have not really ‘learned any lessons.’ Neptune here is, now, a ‘hapless git,’ and then the line is repeated from the earlier poem, ‘his wants shrunk to an infallible kit.’

In his book, Englishness and National Culture, Anthony Easthope derided the Romantic poets for the way in which they appeared to colonise the inner worlds of those whom they sort to portray. For Easthope, that colonization reached its apogee in Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper,’ of which Easthope comments, ‘The poem treats the speaker’s reflections as entirely his own, not owing anything to convention as mediation between object and subject’. Rather more damningly, Easthope maintains that the lyrical ‘I’ represents:

the good old English transcendental ego, the “I” that surveys the world with splendid confidence from a position of supposed exteriority, reflects upon it (or meditates), and masters what it sees. An unreflecting free-standing ego is assumed and enacted in the secure positionality of “I am that coal,” “I’m not surprised,” “I was there,” “I climbed.”

In discussing Anne Rouse, in this light there is an added irony, as Rouse was born in the United States and it is that ‘insider/ousider’ status that Petch sees as being to Rouse’s artistic advantage. But we might also go back to the word that ‘superior’ that Petch uses. It is clear, however, that Rouse would not use that word and does not attempt to portray her ‘Neptune’ in anything other than a sympathetic light. The reader at this point in cultural history, however, might worry that Easthope’s ‘a position of supposed exteriority’ creates an unwonted ambiguity around Petch’s sense of that insider/outsider status with its possible ‘secure positionality’ even where, for Easthope, such superiorities are ineluctably ‘English.’

Another way to look at these elements in Rouse’s writing is through the lens of the political. Ruth Padel and Sean O’Brien used this word of Rouse’s poetry in their PBS Bulletin note on Rouse’s second book, Timing, in 1997. Here, ‘political’ becomes an umbrella term for the ‘insider/outsider’ status, for the way the poetry attempts its searching empathies, and also the ways in which irony is placed in the writing. In placing her Neptune in the hands of hostels and the DSS, Rouse establishes a social context for her subject. And it is clear that Rouse sees that social context as disadvantaging. To adduce the hostel and the DSS to place immediately before the reader, the social context is political. It suggests that the Neptune figure lacks agency. But it is Rouse as the writer who makes that decision in ‘observing’ that figure.

All of these elements are intertwined. And Rouse at her best, transcends those elements. It is perhaps those poems in the first book where she attempts that condensing that feel more successful, more complicated and unresolved. The poem ‘Hurt,’ begins,

A great hurt is waiting in the room.

-We could catch a movie if we’re quick.

- This drink tastes nice,

What did you say you called it?

Rouse has had plays read and in 2024 announced that she had become a mentored writer at the theatre company Paines Plough. The use of direct speech in ‘Hurt’, perhaps prefigures that interest in drama. Here, what the direct speech does is to allow a space to get into the poem. That space is what lies behind and beyond the words. The opening line of the poem creates the context for the direct speech, but the two together allow Rouse to raise the emotional temperature while, at the same time, controlling those emotions. In this poem, that control enables Rouse to create a subtle trajectory to the emotional course of the poem, whose last six lines are,

Anything other than saying, gentle now,

I’ll let you, hurt, I’ll stay,

And waking up to the chilling sheets,

Flat and lost as after a failed operation,

And walking down the avenues alone

With the dim-witted solace of morning.

The careful precision of the commas in ‘I’ll let you, hurt, I’ll stay,’ creates a profound ambiguity around the word ‘you.’ Does it refer to the Other in the poem, the one who hurts? Or does it refer to the hurt itself? And the ‘anything other,’ also creates an unresolved suspension in the poem, repeated as it is from the start of the second verse. We would expect some formulation such as, ‘Anything other than X and I will … ‘ Although there are the two ‘I’ll’s in that second line, they don’t appear to offer the resolution of a non-conditional clause. Neither of the participles ‘waking’ and ‘walking’ offer resolution since the subject of those verbs is elided. But it is the rest of this poem which so skillfully captures the interiority of the failure of the relationship

What Rouse achieves here is combining the way in which the characters are drawn with deft strokes and the space I have mentioned above. That space opens out for the reader such that Rouse’s additional details of the ‘chilling sheets’ and that spectacular metaphor of the failed operation add to the richness available rather than closing it down.

If Rouse’s next, second, book, Timing, feels on the whole more achieved, it is perhaps because of the ability to condense that I have mentioned above. Thus, although some of the themes of Sunset Grill are repeated here, there seems to be a more nuanced psychological acuity. And poems in Timing often contain a vocabulary which carries the condensation of the poem but opens out the reading. In the taut narrative, ‘Woman, 28, hung for stealing a watch,’ the narrator comments, ‘ I’ve known her steady as the flux of moons;’ in ‘The Narrows,’ a taxi driver poses the narrator the question, ‘What is there beside work and sleep?’ (Rouse’s italics) towards the end of the poem, she comments, ‘With that muttering ease of cabs, / he drove off to confound another soul, / turning right on the station road.’ In both these cases, the precise placing of the more ‘poetic’ items both counters the plainness of the language around then. However, that contrast both shows up the poetic and the plain but also regulates them so that they don’t become, in a sense, too poetic or too plain. The poems become more condensed but offer a dynamic range within the poem that is not overbalanced.

In contrast, there are poems in Timing that the back cover blurb tells us are ‘performance pieces.’ It’s worth noting here that Timing was published in 1997 when performance poetry was in its infancy. But the poem that blurb focuses on is ‘Spunk Talking,’ which begins,

When men are belligerent or crude,

it’s spunk talking, it’s come come up for a verbal interlude:

in your face Jack, get shagged, get screwed, get your tits out,

In our current age of Andrew Tate and toxic masculinity, Rouse could be forgiven for thinking that that particular wheel had come full circle. And it’s possible to imagine an audience in the 1990s whooping when that particular poem was performed. Earlier in Timing is the poem, ‘Queynt,’ which offers a delicate riposte to the later poem. Here it is in full,

Homage to the phalli,

where are your celebrations?

In the delivery suite;

among the porn queens?

Blood-warm and sea-brine,

maroon luxurious

rupture, your monuments

aren’t theirs,

columns and Concorde; you’ve

only you, strong

as grass, sly mouth. Lewd

old thing.

This is clearly a different kind of poem to ‘Spunk Talking.’ If it is, in its own way, just as explicit, here, the nature of explicitness is designed to emphasise the contrast. Within the poem, there are contrasts of focus: between the physical nature of the vagina and the ‘monuments,’ that the poet assigns to the phallus. In ‘Spunk Talking,’ it is the ‘talking’ the verbalizing, that is both ironized and shown as the danger. In ‘Queynt,’ the physical description is pitted against the symbolism. It is the divorce of the reality from the verbalizing and symbolism that poses the danger. Again, too, we encounter that particular use of metaphor mentioned above, with the vagina, ‘as strong as grass.’ The metaphor with its sensual intellection acts almost as a bridge between the physical and the verbal, to the advantage of the vagina, the focus of the metaphor.

There has always been a metaphysical streak in Rouse’s poetry. For Rouse, this shows itself in a quest to know what it means to ‘be’ in the contemporary world. If the cliched answer to the question, ‘Why did you go into politics?’ is, ‘to change people’s lives,’ then Rouse’s life and writing seem to ask and answer those questions with considerable centripetal force. Rouse has trained and worked as a nurse, a NUPE official and for the mental health charity MIND. And if poems such as ‘England Nil’ and ‘Spunk Talking,’ are performance pieces, they also fit alongside those other poems discussed above in which Rouse attempts to empathise with and understand the nature of the Other. In other poems, such as the brilliant ‘Key’ from Sunset Grill, Rouse is clearly focused on grappling with what it means to understand those essences. These are the final eight line of ‘Key’s’ twelve altogether,

After the junction she stopped, and sensed –

Not “history”, pack-animal to the mind’s bazaar –

But that odder things, from the first sea-cell,

To her, to the boy

Skating among push-chairs, to this:

Consciousness, growing words like skin.

She turned the key to the flat;

Let the High Road in.

Of course, it might be objected that ‘Key’ takes a rather well-worn route. The observer becomes aware of human evolution ‘from the first sea-cell, / To her,’ and simply places that awareness upon the scene observed. But Rouse’s way of placing that awareness, I would suggest, brings the observer and the reader closer to a sense of the observer’s becoming that awareness. The section I have quoted begins ‘after the junction.’ There is something of the ‘road not taken,’ here. ‘History,’ which is the subject Rouse studied at university, becomes inadequate to the task of interpretation. Inside ‘history,’ it is the ‘odder’ things that focus the observer’s attention: the very fact that ‘she’ is there at all; the commonplace of the boy skating among the push chairs; through to the very fact of having consciousness and the language to express it. As against the larger forces of history, which we might see as, in part at least, imbuing a political consciousness, it is the realities of the walk along the High Street that bring reality in.

The final two lines here might be seen as analogous to the very idea of writing. If words are a skin, i.e., a vulnerable protection, then the return to the flat and the very action of the turning the key in the lock means that that outside world permeates that lived space, gets beneath the skin, and what has gone on before enacts itself in words, the words of the poem.

Rouse’s third book, The School of Night, further adopts that slightly surreal skewing of perspective. That perspective is built of solid realities, but those realities add up to something both more and less concrete, reified. Here, too, I would suggest, the realities are subject to elements of metaphysical inspection. This is the whole of ‘West Hill,’

Portents in the east? Four pairs of magpies.

Dusk dawdles in from seawards, ring on ring.

The castle leers, a ragged wraith,

across the tumbled breathing in the grass

and prompts a sudden bellow from a man

whose prowling in the cliffs has been disturbed.

His avid protests sound too late:

the little guardian lights reassure along the front,

the town lights pulse below, and ascending, this

is where the great warm darkness is.

The first thing to notice is the clipped nature of the style. The clauses are often coterminous with the line. And the rove over of ‘this / is’ is quite self-consciously against that previous line organization. Within this seemingly stolid form, the emotions portrayed are clearly jagged. The first word pushes the reader away from a sense of ease. And to follow the word ‘portents’ with the image of the magpies, although it answers the question mark, washes back to that word ‘portents,’ to ensure it works doubly hard. Thus the line is organized so that emphasis, if you like, occurs both at the start of the line and at the end of the line. The rest of the poem moves between, lurches almost, images of comfort and images of disturbance: the dusk ‘dawdling,’; the castle ‘leering,’; the disturbed man with his ‘avid protests.’ And yet the lights guarding the front, little as they are, reassure. Then the poem turns with the word ‘ascending,’ and reaches its climax with a melding of both comfort and disturbance in the phrase, ‘great warm darkness.’

In the poem, both animate and inanimate are given agency. To an extent, the magpies are given agency in that they portend; the grass, too, breathes, if raggedly; the man bellows and the lights reassure. Thus, the poem creates a world which is seen in the moment of becoming itself, almost reacting to itself, enacting its own being. Again, it is noticeable how the rove over ‘this/is’ is not only to an extent mimetic but insures that the last line both begins and ends with the word ‘is.’

‘Passage,’ from The School of Night begins

In the passage between houses,

a rucksack gaped in the dirt, revealing

a milkpan, a toy kettle,

and a greenish, flat bottle of olive oil.

When I came up that narrow way again,

the rucksack had gone.

The cooking things lay absurd, under a wisteria.

I took the olive oil home.

In the middle of the poem, however, there has been a transformation, which I’ll quote through to the poem’s end,

But today the passage undulates free

between the old-rose bricks,

the dark August leaves parting

for turrets, and captain’s walks,

and a sliver of turquoise,

on which an immaculate sail

rides motionless, a small white yacht

whose invisible hull

winks, diamond, down the coast,

and what could it be signalling?

Never distress, the sea is too serene.

It must be the sun, its last late beam,

exiled, hailing, goodbye.

Petch comments that these elements in the poem,’symbolise liberation from the strangling codes of a cultural norm,’ and John Kerrigan, ‘you may be paradoxically less yourself in a room which mimics domestic space than in a room which doesn’t,’ Petch later commenting that the imagination has transformed the earlier wreckage into ‘a condition of freedom, enchantment and serenity.’

Here, Kerrigan’s comment that ‘you are paradoxically less yourself in a room that mimics domestic space than in a room that doesn’t,’ might fit with the existential nature of the writing we have looked at in ‘West Hill,’ What that assumes, of course, is that domesticity leads to a becoming more yourself. In The School of Night, Rouse is liable to subject such notions to some scrutiny. If the narrator of ‘Passage,’ has come up again to this passage between the houses, then they have come up to what is clearly an interstitial space. If it might be said that the space occurs between ‘houses,’ that still might not be to claim that the houses offer domesticity either. The domestic equipment at the start of the poem is found in a rucksack, emphasizing its mobility in the first place. The rucksack then goes and the cooking equipment becomes ‘absurd.’ The means to move has indeed moved and so the cooking equipment which might have provided a temporary, mobile means of sustaining the self loses that purpose in such away that its value is completely undermined.

The metamorphosis, here, is from the wrecked domesticity of the poem’s beginning through to its seemingly irenic ending. In ‘West Hill,’ comfort and discomfort are blended in one landscape with a final settling in on that ambivalently ‘warm’ darkness. ‘Passage’ offers the thing that its title adumbrates. However, the passage to a final teleology becomes ambiguous. While the sea maybe ‘serene,’ there is the possibility that the sun has made a kind of final farewell, underlined in that last isolated line. And the participles, ‘exiled’ and ‘hailing,’ offer an implicit tension; ‘exiled’ suggested something pushed away, sequestrated, whereas ‘hailing’ suggests some things reaching towards, asking for attention, saving like the sailor adrift on the sea. That final italicized ‘goodbye,’ might also imply the sun’s acceptance of the exile in its last minute. The yacht and the sea might be serene, but above them the sun seems rather less so. For Petch, again, this is symptomatic of a type of a gendered ‘escape.’ If that escape is so, then what is it that has escaped? Is it the yacht, the sea, the sun, or the narrator of the poem who has escaped from the chaotic and displaced domesticity of the start of the poem where the domestic utensils exist temporarily in the passage between the houses. This is the passage that the narrator has come ‘up to again.’ But that search exists at the end of the poem as well.

In a personal correspondence cited by Petch, Rouse commented to Petch in 2009, that, ‘My feeling is that we’re in a critical stage in the West, and that poetry must not only confirm the need for an active reorientation (our fundamental selves vis-a`-vis earth, the disadvantaged and the third world) but embody such a change. It needs to do this through joining with other art forms, finding new methods of dissemination, but most of all, by being an authentic, future-directed voice.’ What Rouse ask for is that there is an active reorientation of ‘our fundamental selves.’ Whether reorientation of that fundamental self is what occurs in The School of Night might be a moot point. That the self is reorientated is, I have contended, at the center of much of Rouse’s project in that book. But perhaps in the five-year gap between the publication of The School of Night in 2004 and her comments to Petch in 2009, Rouse’s larger environmental and social concerns had come to take a greater importance than the metaphysical seeking The School of Night explores.

In 2008, a year before that comment emailed to Petch, Rouse published The Upshot, a new and selected. Unlike many books like that, The Upshot starts with the new material. The new material is separated from the earlier material with a title and date, ‘The Divided (2008)’ as if these were poems for a putative single volume. Perhaps, Rouse had, actually, submitted those poems for a single volume and then her publishers, Bloodaxe, asked her for a Selected.

I have discussed above the poem ‘Distance from the Sun,’ from the new poem section of The Upshot. In that poem, Rouse appeared to be revisiting characters that she had written about before, rather in the manner of a novel, play or film. In the case of the Neptune character, Rouse actually repeats a line from the earlier poem. In some ways, that sense of the character having learned nothing is thus emphasized.

It is a slight pity that this strategy seems to return Rouse into the commentative mode of the earlier books, when that is not really the feel of the poems in ‘The Divided,’ section of The Upshot. And there are some elements in ‘The Divided,’ that give it the slight feel of treading water. The autobiographical poems are sometimes even more direct than they are in the earlier volumes. A poem such as, ‘The Verbals,’ plays on the idea of the narrator moving with age from the usage of a word like, ‘mistake,’ to ‘foibles.’ Later still, ‘the word failings arrived in the other’s mouth.’ The ‘other’ here doesn’t have a capital ‘O.’ And, although the word is singular does that necessarily suggest that only one person is suggested. And the rest of the poem creates a centripetal flow of introspection. What is interesting in the context of the style, however, is the final line, ‘Stuck in a fault; pinioned to a sky of stone.’ That sudden move out into imagery, at the end of the poem, is typical of that aspect of Rouse’s writing which seeks almost to mimic the metaphor she uses here, to pinion an emotion. There is an element of Eliot’s of the ‘objective correlative,’ which might be a strategy to mediate between the real and surreal and seek an emotional core to the image.

Some fourteen years after The Upshot, Rouse published Ox-Eye. The back cover blurb describes the poems as having the ‘perspective in Ox-Eye – the term for a small cloud presaging a storm – is one of apprehension in poems relating to personal and social change. … casting a critical eye on what we wish for; and what may happen instead.’ Well, up to a point. The poems in Ox-Eye might be divided roughly into those where the result is quite fully imagined and those where it feels as though the poem is quite received. Of course, Rouse uses her imagination in all of the work. But there are poems here where description is based on observation and those where the description feels more based upon the workings of the mind.

The former type of poem might be exemplified with ‘Inconsequence,’ which I will quote in full.

Drowsing on the steel fire steps

that end in ferns and wallflowers,

you hear a rasping. In come the bag men.

The evening, a cinder, drops into their bag.

Workaday words are said.

The clouds are water vapour.

A flash of wings means prey.

A sail, lit up for a time, is heading in,

under tremendous shadows.

It will disappear. But I’ve seen.

As we’ve seen above, Rouse, herself, was, even in the early stages of her career, very aware of the uses and abuses of condensing matters in her poetry. And what ‘matters’ might mean here is a moot point. In ‘Inconsequence,’ we can see that the majority of the lines are complete sentences or complete clauses. Thus, prosody would tell us, the line ends would be coterminous with a fall in intonation, indicating the end of that piece of information. The first sentence in the poem runs over two and a half lines. Each line contains a verb, in the first line a present participle, lines two and three with finite verbs. The ‘you’ at the start of line three appears to be the implicit subject of the participle ‘drowsing’ that begins that first line. And the sentence ends with the participle ‘rasping.’ From that first combination of the indefinite and the finite, we get a kind of litany of occurrences. But these occurrences are themselves quite indefinite: we do not know who the ‘bag’ men are; why is the evening a ‘cinder’ and why does it drop into their bag. We have some sense of the men’s conversation, but other than the suggestion that it is about the job in hand, we do not know what it is. The clouds are pointedly insubstantial. The bird is a ‘flash of wings.’ And we have the metonym of the ‘sail’ with the boat itself carefully elided, under those ‘tremendous shadows.’ And it may be that the ‘it’ in the final line is the boat indicated by the sail, will disappear.

The narrator aroused from the drowsing in the first line has, however, seen, been aware. Of course, it is the elision of all these elements that adds up to the ‘inconsequence’ of the title. Yet, the existence of the poem is a witness to what the narrator has ‘seen.’ The authorizing consciousness of the poem is, in the existence of the poem, making the reader witness to the events recorded. And it is part of Rouse’s undoubted skill that the reader does ‘witness,’ via the fragments so vividly reported.

As I’ve suggested, this kind of ‘reportage’ is a full part of this book. In poems such as ‘Late Swim,’ whose subject is as the title indicates a evening swim in the sea, it is Rouse’s descriptive abilities that bring such an ordinary event alive. ‘Stripped, I’m in, affronted, as long caverns / spill late reds; turn and idle on the swell, / while brief shapes cross a twilit promenade.’ That description of the waves on the shore as ‘long caverns’ that ‘spill late reds,’ is particularly effective and typical of the powers Rouse brings to observation.

Elsewhere, as mentioned above, the poems feel a lot more like an exploration of a fiction. Here, Rouse’s imagination is often allied to the quality of observation of the poems above. ‘Notes from a Moon Station’ begins,

Reliquary of streets and flowers

Swinging its dust behind for divers.

Topaz earthlight. At lunar midnight,

I fall into the ecstatic false sublime.

These apparitions float to us:

a threshold, tiled cream and russet.

Speckled flagstones.

They were blacking the land by the gate.

That wrinkled skein. Acheron.

It is interesting that Rouse has recently published short fiction; short fiction which she, herself, describes as ‘surreal.’ There is a great fullness to the writing of ‘Notes from a Moon Station.’ The narrator of the poem plunges into the space observed from the station and visualizes the lights and colours of that space as the remnants of objects and vistas. That visualization is pulled back from in the comment ‘the ecstatic false sublime,’ an interesting phrase which suggests the kind of educated sensibility that might be more like that of the writer and yet retains a power to affect the reader. And, although that phrase undercuts the visualization, neither the visualization or its presentation in the ‘notes’ are un-written; they constitute ‘the poem.’ That sense of the ‘false sublime,’ is further emphasized with the word ‘apparitions’ at the beginning of the next stanza. This stanza moves the reader further away from the ‘realities’ of space with the notion of space appearing as ‘Acheron,’ the river that flows into the gates of Hell in Greek mythology. The force of space as mythology is emphasized by the placing of the name in a sentence by itself.

‘Notes from a Moon Station’ ends thus,

Even now, the four messengers hover.

They deliver nightly to the camps: wormwood, laurels, prophecy.

Their garments bell out, their motionless.

We’re done, though, done with their four

swords meeting at star point, overhead.

Lead on, I shout, but they do not move.

The scenario sketched out here appears to echo some of those space films in which the spaceman becomes delusional. However, the power of Rouse’s writing ensures that the poem becomes original in its own way. The twenty lines of the poem pull the reader into a small and finely realized world. The persona of the poem might be delusional but the nature of the delusions becomes almost as real to us as it does to that persona.