Letters to Rosie, Ross Wilson
Tapsalteerie, 2020, £4.00
Rosie-tinted spectacle
There’s a point in ‘Letters to Rosie’ where Cyril Connolly’s idea of the pram in the hall as a sombre enemy to good art kicks in.… I say this not because the poems aren’t good (they are) but more because there’s a gap in the recordings. At some point, about two poems after ‘Joy’, where the titular Rosie has ‘haul[ed] [herself] up / on my leather foot-stool’ and is about to be able to walk, the time shifts and we leap from Rosie being under one to being two.
It’s a well-known truth that a child in possession of mobility is a child causing constant fear in a parent’s heart. So it makes sense that the poems set between one and two-years old tail off. As ‘The clock’ puts it
Before we knew it
forty year old legs were running
after two year olds,
and hands were scooping
one ticking centre into another.
However, Rosie’s life up to this stage is well-documented and well-measured. In ‘Scan’, there’s her as a ‘Wee bean on a screen, / two centimetres long’; and in ‘Keeping time’, we see Wilson measuring new life against death — ‘I’d been thinking of Jim and May, / gone within weeks of each other’. And the premature arrival of Rosie sees him confronting his own aging process: ‘In eight days I’ll be thirty nine. / Two hours ago, you were born.’
This whole pamphlet reads to me as if the poet is pulling memories of Rosie’s early years into a coherent document to pass on to her before time erodes them. As he says himself in the almost-title-poem, ‘For Rosie’:
A year ago the space you’re in
was empty and I, almost forty,
had no memories of you at all.
Now they go into me fast as you grow
into the space you make
in home and head.
The last few words of last poem (‘Echo’) show Rosie becoming more independent — ’your hand / no longer needs / my hand’. As with all parent-child relationships, you wonder who needs whom most.
Mat Riches
Step into a stream of light and warmth
This pamphlet is a physically small thing, not unlike the new life it chronicles. Both have the effect of bringing disproportionate joy to those who encounter them.
Like a young, changing life, these poems will reward revisits when the mind grows weary of the world and needs true, clean freshness that deftly avoids sentimentality.
Moments are what make up a life and this poet gets that. The dedication ‘For Wee Rosie when she’s big’ refers to the poet’s new baby daughter, and Letters to Rosie comprises a sequence of poems beginning with ‘Scan’, when Rosie is nothing more than a ‘Wee bean on a screen’.
The poems are quiet, intimate and loving. We have a real sense of two people building a home together, and the place where they have chosen to do this matters. The name of the town, Cumbernauld, means ‘meeting of the streams’.
Meeting of rivers, yes, and also the couple: their families, glimpsed personal histories, the past and the present. And throughout all this runs a willingness to furnish space for the future, as in ‘Makers’ when the couple are preparing a bedroom for the yet-to-be-born baby:
I carried your cot bed,
flat-packed in a box,
up stairs to the room
I’d painted the day before.
Your Mum and I put it together
like a jigsaw, creating a picture
for your wee character
to play the lead in.
The awareness that a new life changes everything is acknowledged and eagerly awaited. From the premature arrival of the new-born a week before the poet’s own birthday, we witness his awe and joy. The baby’s changes and fleeting expressions are beautifully described. For example, in ‘Shapeshifter’:
You look different everyday
to everybody who looks at you
[…]
depending on who looks in
your ever moving water.
First laughter, first steps, first spoken sounds — all these are noticed like bubbles in an onward-moving stream, as in ‘Shine’ when the poet says ‘I catch what I can with my pen’. He catches it well.