Peter Rose: Attention Please!

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.

Peter Rose: The Subject of Feeling

Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2015, 78pp.

One of the best descriptions of Peter Rose’s poetry is to be found on the blurb (not normally a site of good descriptions) of his third book, Donatello in Wangaratta, which, after mentioning intelligence and a delight in language, speaks of “a heightened awareness of life’s surprising gifts and irredeemable losses, a contemporary and cosmopolitan sensibility”. Of course there is no causal relationship between the two parts of this description but both are, in their own way, true and serve as a good way of describing this new book.

To begin with the second part: one of the things that marks out Rose’s poetry as so distinctive is that, while it explores a complex and intense inner life, it’s a life which is lived in the context of an urbane, cosmopolitan, professionally literary outer life. Everyone’s inner life has, of course, an outer life as a sort of vehicle or protective shell – we are all, after all, situated somewhere in our lives, in a job, an age group, a country – but Peter Rose’s outer life of the activities of a major literary editor, the inevitable visits to the opera or a gallery or a book launch, hours spent at mind-numbing proofreading etc, isn’t really like the outer life of any other Australian poet. It has been said that it feels rather English but this is only because such a professional life is more likely to occur in England where publishers and non-academic intellectuals are rather thicker on the ground. Rose’s national identity (or perhaps, Victorian identity) is, anyway, impeccable since he grew up in a rural town the son of one of Australian Rules Football’s greats.

My feeling about the slight strangeness of the milieu in which the experiences of these poems occur is that it tells us more about other Australian poets than it tells us about Rose. It’s surprisingly odd to read a poet with, apparently, absolutely no interest in landscape, for example, and it’s a reminder of how important landscape, and the various ways its significances can be configured, is to Australian poets. Even Slessor, whom one might look to as a similar literary intellectual, equally a man of the city, has poems about landscape and at least one about the cosmos even if those poems make the point that those things are alien and disconcerting. One might look to Peter Porter but Porter’s exterior life was spent in England and though he happily speaks of “the permanently upright city where / speech is nature and plants conceive in pots” there is a lot of confrontation with landscape and alien geographies in Porter’s poems. And then there is the fact that Porter’s and Rose’s poems seem so entirely different that you feel that the comparisons were made out of ambience rather than poetics.

Then there are “life’s surprising gifts and irredeemable losses”. In Rose’s poetry the former can derive from art but they are usually amatory. He writes brilliantly of the revelations of falling in love even though the experience probably contains the seeds of its failure. There is a poem, “Cheap Editions”, in his first book, The House of Vitriol, which describes those intense moments of literary discovery that happen in one’s late teens. First St John of the Cross encountered in “one of those nasty American editions, / putrid spores and tight-arsed spine” and then Camus’ outsider introduced at “one of those ill-lit parties” turns the world of the saintly doctor upsidedown. But the poem finishes: “Then I met someone, for the first time. / Contentment, voluptuousness, blasted forever”. In other words (as I read it) the early literary passions are essentially trivial and self-indulgent in the face of a real, if temporary passion. Rose has always done this really well: the title poem of Donatello in Wangaratta is about the revelation the child experiences when he sees a print of Donatello’s David.

The failures and losses the world imposes are always present of course. “Sentence” from Rattus Rattus, imagines the self as a kind of Roman victim waiting for the senate’s decree and, probably, the method of execution. As the poems progress, the failures of love become less about love and more about memory, a memory which fixes certain scenes, dates and anniversaries. Thus “Bait”, from The Catullan Rag, begins:

It was one of your last visits.
My memory is sharp, even clinical,
gives interviews like a criminal . . .

Much of this comes together emblematically in the first poem of The Subject of Feeling, “Impromptu”. (Actually, technically, it’s the second poem since the volume is prefixed by “Twenty Questions” an answer to Donald Justice’s poem of the same name. Interestingly the first poem of Rose’s first book, comprises twenty reasons for failure and “Notionalism” in The Catullan Rag is a list of twenty kinds of notion.)

Moments ago, back from the library
and the noisy, populous park
(that shrill of infantocracy),
I was entering our building when
a magpie swooped – taut dart of surprise.
. . . . . 
Well, I was beyond cavilling,
too full of the poem that Donald Justice
had absently enjoined me to pen,
the poem that might lead somewhere
or fail to ascend. Four flights up,
our terrace doors open to summer,
you were playing an Impromptu
by Schubert (very carefully),
arpeggios audible on the street,
if the street cared to attend.
I stood there listening,
mindful of the magpie
and his fierce, nesting, arrowy urge.

There’s stable love, intimacy and music in the upper floors here and they are approached by a poet with his head full of a poem that might or might not work (described in terms of leading somewhere and ascending). And yet the whole thing is framed by a dangerous magpie. I take this to symbolise the darker side of the world and its treasures. It’s tempting, momentarily, to try to be a bit more precise – the magpie is ferocious because it is protecting its nest but poet and partner have no young; or the magpie comes from the natural world into this urban world of flats and music that deliberately excludes it – but in the end, I’ll stay with the slightly more general interpretation.

The “irredeemable losses” that the world imposes are not only amatory ones, of course. There is a trauma at the heart of this inner life and it is one that is continually revisited not to probe a sore tooth but to explore memory: Rose’s brother, Rob, became a quadriplegic after a car accident and died comparatively young. Rose’s much admired memoir, The Rose Boys, details these events but they have always been part of his poetry going back as far as “I Recognise My Brother in a Dream” from The House of Vitriol. In The Subject of Feeling the second section is devoted to poems which are memories of family and the long poem, “Tiles”, which seems, at first, to be about his mother’s experience of eight months in hospital with rheumatic fever and no visitors quickly becomes a story about Robert, in hospital, staying sane by trying to count the tiles in the ceiling of the ward.

As I’ve said, you feel that, as Rose ages, memory itself becomes the subject of the poems rather than the event which is memorialised – something that occurs in Tony Judt’s brilliant memoir (equally devoted to trauma), The Memory Chalet. And movement is involved here in interesting ways. Sometimes you feel the poet move towards memory but, at other times, memory moves towards him. That’s the reason, I think, why “Late Autograph” stays in the mind: Rose is signing copies of The Rose Boys when he sees, in the queue approaching him, an old flame from his adolescent past. What to write? In the end, words fail to solve the problem and the friend gets “something fond and anodyne” but though words fail, memory doesn’t and we are left with a sharply focussed image from the past:

. . . . . 
                                       And then,
transcending those wraiths of reality,
you were standing in front of me again
brazen amid a horde of admirers -
naked, panting, grazed down one side,
towel over your shoulder, teasing me,
calling me nicknames, sweet, aromatic.

If we stand back from this poem a little we can see a situation in which the trigger of a memory moves towards the poet through the mechanism of a queue. Another, “Dux”, which involves meeting with an older woman poet, also is set in a queue though here the queue symbolises a procession of poets slowly getting older but always retaining the same relative positioning. It has a wonderfully oblique opening (a bit like the first sentence of A Passage to India) – “I always remembered her, / if I remembered her at all, / which was not very often, say once a year . . .” But it is really about another issue of memory: though our memories may be clinically clear and we may be confident as to what the actors of those memories mean to us, we cannot be equally clear about what we mean to them in their own memories. Memory, as an important early poem, “The Wound”, suggests unfortunately inclines towards solipsism and here the older poet says “cordial things about a past / more apparent to her, more vivid, tangible”.

The quote from the cover of Donatello in Wangaratta which I’ve used to structure these observations so far, also has a comment about Rose’s “delight in language”. It’s an interesting issue and one remembers another early poem about his brother which says:

You never understood my lexical craze
but I could spend eternity hunting for a
long beautiful word for addicts of anniversaries.
There must be a name for it, a need. . .

In Rose’s previous books I’d always felt that part of the structure of individual poems involved a certain linguistic tension. Many of them seemed to have one unusual or unusually-used word which, you felt, was a way of tightening the poem’s cross-braces or, perhaps, of suggesting the existence of a more complex lexicon that might produce a poetry that is more precise but less comprehensible. I haven’t spent any time on this issue here because I have a sense that it’s not as consistent a feature of the poems of this new book than it might have been in the past. But one poem demonstrates it nicely. “The Vendramin Family” is about Titian’s famous painting:

And why the shocked awe on the staircase
leading nowhere but infinity?
Tell us now, earnest youth
in the second row, mouth open
in something like mystification - 
the idiot as inspirado?
Listless we shelter in the gallery,
the gallery as reliquary -
wet from the London rain,
shaken by wonted sirens,
half-expecting catastrophe
in a handsome guise. Who knows
which way the wind blows,
why the candles lean fondly to the west.

The final section of The Subject of Feeling is a twenty-five poem addition to Rose’s “Catullan Rag” a series imagined to be in the style of Catullus. I think the function of these poems is to allow the poet to let his hair down a little and enter a reasonably scabrous version of literary life, its petty hatreds, viciousnesses and loves, without causing insult to anyone in particular. Thus:

Give up, Catullus. Bury your umbrage and head for the bush.
Warty Suffenus has just got an OAM,
Postumia a Pulitzer for her comic sequel to Moby-Dick.
Wither away, Catullus. Why don’t you just die?

The first thing to say about this enjoyable series is, I suppose, that they tap into only part of Catullus: the epigrams. I don’t want to appear like a picky pedant here, but I love the poetry of Catullus as much as Rose does and I can’t help but feel that someone who went from Rose’s poems to those of Catullus would get quite a shock at how much more they are than mere literary scabrousness – imagine coming up against any of the poems from numbers sixty-one to sixty-four. And even the epigrams almost always sustain themselves not by the shock of their coarseness but by their complex (though witty) structures. It’s also worth pointing out that these poems might now be seen as part of a genre: there are versions of Martial (who I think might be more like Rose’s Catullus than Catullus is) by Peter Porter and Laurie Duggan, David Malouf’s continuing series of modernisations of Horace, some imagined poems of Catullus by David Brooks and Geoffrey Lehmann’s rather wonderful imagined poems of Nero. Someone, one day, will write a long and involved essay about this and what it might mean in Australian poetry.

The second thing to say about the poetry of Catullus vis-a-vis that of Rose is that the former is marked by two traumatic experiences, represented by the two lines of Catullus which have passed into the language. The first (“vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus” – “Lesbia let us live and love”) introduces Catullus’ experience of the agonies and ecstasies of true love and the second (“atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale” – “and so, forever, brother, hello and goodbye”) the untimely loss of his brother whose grave, in the Troad, he is able to visit only in passing. None of Rose’s poems about his brother, Robert, have any connection with his “Catullus” poems, and chronology argues against it, but still it is hard to suppress the idea that a hidden link of loss between the two poets has somehow suggested the idea of inhabiting Catullus’ voice.