World Square, NSW: Pitt Street Poetry, 2025, 81pp.
There’s a ten years gap between Peter Rose’s previous book, The Subject of Feeling, and this new one, Attention, Please!. But despite this, there are a lot of continuities within the two. In fact there are a lot of continuities throughout the whole of Rose’s poetic career, beginning with his first book, The House of Vitriol, thirty-five years ago. Much of this relates to the kind of poetry he writes as he is one of those poets who makes poems out of immediate life experiences – experiences of living and loving, and experiences of thinking. True in the earlier books there are examples of extended, disjunctive poems – the title poem of The House of Vitriol, for example, or its opening poem, “Pathology” – but a rough stab at describing his career would say that these have gradually been replaced as a result of his realising that his best work lies in shorter, shapelier lyric pieces reflecting, in one poem, a complex of reactions to some experience or other. There is probably more that should be said here about what this means in terms of the relationship between poem and self and generally this is something I would leave to those more expert in the subject than I am, but at least it can be said that he never seems to be a poet who stands outside of himself or devotes any time to forging a “poetic identity”. The best poems emerge from the interaction between a complex individual – complex in the sense of being compounded of his history, ideas, experiences, prejudices and enthusiasms – and a particular experience. All made into a satisfying shape. As a result the poems give us an experience of life which is more “authentic – a dangerous word – than those written by poets with a theme to explore or a position to take.
In a sense never intended by whoever invented the phrase (or, probably approved of by Peter Rose) the body of his work does create a kind of livre compose. Over the course of the thirty-five years of his books there’s a clear movement from “themes” of anger and irritation to those of a wry acceptance of being – as all the elderly are (haud inexpertus loquor) – a bit out of step with reality, oppressed by the deaths of family and friends (the second section of Attention, Please! is devoted to poems of the latter sort). Of course, memory is a key component of our consciousnesses at any age and so it makes the simple description of the drift of his poetry that I’m attempting here rather more complex. A poem from The House of Vitriol like “The Prime Minister’s Grandson” which recalls a school-fellow – “Hermetic, bloodless, solitary / enemy of gossip and galumphing athleticism, / thin and morbid as a Byzantine” – could, it seems to me, have been written at any stage of Rose’s poetic career as could “The Wound” – “I was there when it happened, / the night you cut yourself, marred / those peerless hands on a specious blade.”
But I think the idea of a poetry which, almost unconsciously, reflects in its themes and tones the ageing (or maturing) of its author stands as a basic, working definition of the course of Rose’s extremely appealing poetry. The second and third poems of this new book are a good example of bleakness met by a maturely wry attitude. In “The Circuiteers” we are first given a description of Melbourne during the plague:
Day flicks its cards, laconic. Even in April, a flamboyance of colour: stray perfume for the pent. Burnt leaves drift away one by one, like concert-goers after interval. High and handsome loom the houses, forlorn, dogless even . . .
Poet and partner continue on their allowed daily circuit in the park – “Undeceived and wan, we trudge and trudge; / the circuiteers of inconsequence”. All the items noted in the poem, the builders who are allowed to go on working “listening to the songs of the eighties”, the kookaburras, dogs and pigeons, the cordoned off broken tree bough, the triathletes making the most of their opportunity, “haughty in their charismatic tans” all make up a portrait of a scene perceived as essentially meaningless by those whose walk in the park is a matter of permitted exercise.
“Honey”, the next poem, is jaundiced rather than wry – a portrait of an obnoxious child hogging a seat on a tram – “That plump, straw-haired brat / on the 58 tram brings out the prig in me – / avuncular not!” And “Valley Forge”, conceived as an introduction for people thinking of joining “the program”, sets out a course of medication which, rather like the soma of Huxley’s Brave New World, will remove “everything / that makes life colourful but pathological: / despair, terror, guilt, trauma, memory” reducing people to the equivalent of being “circuiteers of inconsequence”.
Although one doesn’t want to give the impression that this is a book of depression – Rose’s formidable intelligence, wittiness and aptness of registration precludes this – much of a similar tone can be found in the poems of the book’s third section. Indeed the opening poem, “Woodend Saturday”, seems to inhabit the same bleak suburban world as “The Circuiteers”:
Meagre as afternoon, all these sultry unhappenings. The tenacity of dog walkers firm with the leash, the petulance of children incensed by truant mothers. Endless rallies on a court. . .
As does “F1” where the unlovely circling of race-cars around the track becomes a symbol for recurrent patterns in a dreary existence:
. . . . . On benches they sit with their spaniels: the widows, the bachelors, inured to not being noticed, lean valour for the disenfranchised. Soon we must opt for someone: the F1, a new election. Does it give us pause, everything come round again, tawdry, futile, undeclared?
Placed between these two sections is the second, a section devoted to poems of loss. Two of the poems are about the ageing and death of the poet’s mother, another of a childhood school-mate and the final one of a poet – Rose imagines what he might say at a meeting at Collected Works to celebrate the recently deceased John Ashbery:
. . . . . All I can think to say, Episcopalian hand on heart, is that reading him is like being at a cleverer party than you really deserve, bailed up on a patio by someone much drunker than you, saying the most astonishing things.
Interestingly, at least two of these poems, “Contrary Winds” and “Styptic”, are firmly anchored in the routines of the poet’s own literary life. They are night-time poems that only move onto the subject of the dead father and dead mother late on:
. . . . . Moving through the house, I nod to my father, photographed between a premier and a prime minister, all the same height, conveniently. They were naming something after him, a social club, fittingly. Now it is superseded, like all three of them. In the gloom I note the Kalmus edition of Prokofieff’s Nine Sonatas . . .
And “Styptic” is a complex and meandering meditation that begins with editorial tasks, moves on to Hardy’s poetry, thence to various disturbing events on the news and thence to his late mother who was always surprised to hear an announcer identify himself because he shares the same name with her father, a father who had left the family when she was three more than ninety years ago.
In other words, these are not so much poems of mourning – though they are that – so much as poems of memory, the memories that arise during an ordinary working day (or night). They have already been internalised and absorbed as much as such inevitable pains can ever be absorbed. They are poems which begin inside the poet’s self without any pretence at being an external celebration or mourning in the usual manner of poems from “Lycidas” to, say, John Manifold’s “The Tomb of Lt John Learmonth, AIF”.
Which brings us to the last section of the book, poems which are additions in Rose’s long-term project of writing a series of poems in the manner of Catullus. This goes back, as a note in Crimson Crop says, to the 1980s – in other words it has been a continuing project throughout Rose’s career. Although there isn’t a separate section of such poems in The House of Vitriol, there are a number that look decidedly like Rose’s Catullus poems, especially the “young poet” series in the second section. There’s a lot about this sequence which is continuously fascinating. One of Catullus’s best known poems is his description of visiting his much-loved brother’s grave in the Troad which ends with one of the few lines of classical poetry which has entered everyday speech: “atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale”, “And so, forever, brother, greetings and farewell”. Rose’s own brother suffered an early death after being paralysed from a car accident, events documented in Rose’s book Rose Boys. Perhaps more significant from a poetic point of view is the fact that Catullus, who died around the age of thirty, is fixed as a “young poet” and his style in which passionate erotic desire is mixed with passionate rages and frustrations – always in sophisticated and shapely poems – doesn’t have to undergo the changes which inevitably come with age and experience and which, as I said at the beginning, is the essential trajectory of a poet like Rose. As someone once said, Byron’s early death was a good move and prevented us having to cope with him as a grumpy, bewhiskered Tory member of parliament.
So the Catullus poems are a way in which Rose can write as though life after early adulthood hadn’t happened. It’s not so much the content which is frozen in time – even Lesbia is aging in these poems – but the manner. And this tart manner gets to explore both love and the literary life. The first poem, “Hubris”, deals with the former –
Will Catullus never learn? He has only to congratulate himself on obliterating Lesbia, has only to boast about all the years that have passed since he last thought of his tentatrice, than she looms that night in a dream, radical, wanton, avid as ever.
and a poem like “Aphrodite”, the latter –
Another catalogue from erudite Postumia, who has given more of her life to Aphrodite than sodden Ares and his priapic rivals. When they launch her magnum opus at the museum ample Postumia insists on being photographed next to the comely original. A wiser scholar would have absented herself.
This alternation between poems about his love life – a suitably tempestuous one with Lesbia whom the actual Catullus describes, perhaps hyperbolically, as having three hundred lovers – and about the cast of fellow poets is one which has been kept up since The Catullan Rag. Of the original Catullus’s fellow poets – Calvus, Cinna, Caecilius and Volusius – only Calvus, in the same role as poetic friend, makes it into the “Catullan rag” poems. Instead we meet Suffenus and Socration as well as a minor figure or two. Suffenus is an interesting invention because, as the poem, “Clay” in The Subject of Feeling says, Catullus and Suffenus were born withing minutes of each other even if “hundreds of miles away”. This leads any reader, inevitably, to wonder whether one isn’t an imagined alter ego of the other. In which case the comic hostilities of Suffenus for Catullus, expressed in a poem like, “Abacus”,
Harsh and malignant is the song of your abacus, atrabilious Suffenus. Balmy though the night and innocent the lovers, all you think of is Catullus - how to spite him. But why this rancour? Why such libellous intent? Whom have you been pumping in your vicious viaduct? As dawn pinkens the trees and armies of lovers stir on their captivated beds, Suffenus opens another red and licks his poisoned letter.
would be as much an internalised criticism as an external one.
There has always been a lot to enjoy in those of the Catullan poems that deal with literary life, especially the egotism and lack of perspective of figures like Postumia and, even more so, Socration. I doubt if they add up to some sort of roman a clef casting light on the intricacies of contemporary Australian literary life, though any reader is, of course, tempted to go looking for identifications. The final poem, “Two Thousand and One Nights” begins ominously:
Surely it must abate soon, Catullus can’t go on writing those rubbishy poems forever. How they creak like arthritis. Surely they must dry up eventually. Year after year he pops up in journals that tolerate his fetishes, his creepy anniversaries. . .
but you hope it isn’t the case and that not only do the Catullan poems continue but the other poems as well.
