The school of night

the long version

Anne Rouse's poems belong to the school of modern verse that relies on careful, detailed observation of reality as it presents itself to the poet. An American from Virginia, she moved to London to study, and writes poems largely situated in that most poetically familiar of 'unfamiliar' territories, the city of London at night. in 'Fort DeWitt' we enter "Safeway's opulent chill", a wonderful phrase redolent of the air-conditioned consumerist aisle of plenty; 'Aura' opens in another marketplace at dawn, when "A winter sun is fingering the stalls, / slowly lightening, like milk in tea" before "a woman / rigid as a crane, and elder Fury / in descent, who angles fiercely for / a bargain lime-green double-pack". These are images of the urban present, lamenting the reduction of the world to market forces ("that long violence", the poem calls it), the limiting of human desires. This reinvests images of modern alienation and dehumanisation with pertinent political force and adds weight to Rouse's observations.