The Authority of Roses
The Authority of Roses (1997), Ross Leckie’s second poetry collection, revolves around water in its various forms. While water is not the sole subject of poetic inspiration, it provides a motif which flows through the collection as a whole, evident in the recurrently watery titles: “Water Finding Its Own Level,” “Raining Cats and Dogs,” “The Lake’s Formality at Evening,” “Domestic and Alien Waters,” and “The River That Winds Through Memory.” The various sections of The Authority of Roses are prefaced by engravings from Albert F. Moritz’s book America the Picturesque in Nineteenth Century Engraving (1983) that evoke the central themes of the sections, such as the engraving of animals lying on a riverbank that precedes the section “Domestic and Alien Waters”. While the section titles match the water-motif, however, the collection’s title The Authority of Roses does not feel like an apt label. Although the title derives from a poem in the collection—a poem which seems to be an allegory of the poem-writing process itself—Leckie’s pen finds more inspiration in droplets of water than leaflets of roses. Leckie uses water to reflect on a multitude of scenes, whether it be the “way the water rippled with the fleets” in “Songs of Troy Remembered,” or the canoe in a river as an analogy of the human body in “At the Funeral.” Sometimes swift as a current, or slowly swirling around objects (circular motions being another recurring motif in Leckie’s work), water in these poems becomes existence itself, in the tradition of Greek philosopher Thales, who theorized water constituted the universe. In “Travels in Greece,” “Thales” is in for a swim. He calls, / ‘The water’s great.’” Rivers, lakes, even drops “along a single razor / of grass” provide ongoing images throughout this book and into his later collection Gravity’s Plumb Line (2005).
As “Travels in Greece” indicates, Leckie often alludes to the ancient Greeks, penning poems about classical philosophers, as well as reflections on events like the Trojan War. “Travels in Greece” is a playful encyclopaedia of early philosophers like Zeno and Parmenides, set during a contemporary holiday in the Mediterranean. In “Pan-Hellenic Montreal,” Leckie mingles together Montreal and Greece, as he sees in “one’s breath / the palpable helmet of Athene.” A sonnet sequence called “Songs of Troy Remembered” follows a veteran of the Trojan War who returns to the plains outside the city to reflect on the long campaign. However, the fighting has long ended; instead, poems like “memory” feature fishermen in the harbour who “shout jibes about / each other’s prowess with a boat.” The prophetess who would not be believed is absent from the poem named after her—“Cassandra”—but her captor Agamemnon is depicted, apparently after his murder, for his eyes are “shrivelled olives.” “The Wooden Horse” frames the outcome of the Trojan War as a kind of equine revenge, as the veteran happens “on a man who had beaten his horse / to death” and reflects on the sacrifice of horses during battle.
“Domestic and Alien Waters” is a section depicting animals living where water meets land, like “The Albatross” or insects like the “Dragonfly” which “frequent the lake’s surface.” Philosophical “Mourning Doves” are compared to Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Thinker.” “We have much to learn / about the way the male brings twigs to the female, / the way both sexes incubate the eggs equally, / perhaps even about the way they mate for life.” Anthropomorphizing animals or objects is a frequent tactic of Leckie’s, and his contemplations of the natural world recurrently convey insight into the human condition, though he comments directly on humanity through the section “The River That Winds Through Memory.” “Growing up Anglo in Quebec” draws on Leckie’s childhood in the province, and through a near reversal, highlights the effect of Anglophone condescension and prejudice on separatist sentiment: “We were separate, wanted to be separate, yet / we become so angry when they spoke of separatism.”
Leckie’s voice is a learned and erudite one, his allusive style and sophisticated diction giving The Authority of Roses a much more high modernist tone than the later Gravity’s Plumb Line. Constantly risking verbosity, Leckie gives the thesaurus a workout here, so to speak, with elevated diction like “definitude,” “escutcheon,” and “liquefactive.” But his command of language is for the most part sure, and only occasionally does his word choice create bulky passages like “the motile personages stamp pneumatically / to their employment” which, in its formality, detracts from the image of the repetitive motions of machine-like employees. Leckie often plays with unusual but simple words—e.g. the “Dragonfly” which is “larger than life, / in all of its alien thinginess” until it “makes a loud thwack / on the windshield of your / speedboat, splashing its dollop / of life.” The collection is rich in alliterative and assonantal combinations, like “the plump primping priapism of their masts” in “Frenchman’s Bay, Lake Ontario” or “These images of ridicule, slippery pips spit on the grass” in “The Watermelon.”
Leckie plays with traditional form as well as contemporary techniques to create a collection that honours old forms such as the sonnet as well as frees lines with more contemporary enjambment. Leckie uses rhyme deftly and unobtrusively because of his diverse vocabulary and handling of enjambment, as in the sonnet “The Quarry.” As well, poems like “The Watermelon” display a subtle wit, for he gives the melon a brain, “mottled green with dark green veins.” The children in “Forbidden Berries” are convinced they ate poisonous berries, though their mother knows better: “Dread was the paralysis that tip-toed through the blood, / though she admitted later they weren’t poisonous.”
Ultimately, whether Leckie is depicting Ancient Greece or present-day Shediac Beach, the collection presents his attempt to capture glittering moments of the natural world, where intelligence and meaning, arguably of a more human nature, abound:
The machine is all surface, whose meditation
is a pixilating play of sunlight across the tossing
water. This river of light has its shimmer of
spellbound intelligence. When the breeze shifts,
it freezes, then leaps into the forest of words.