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The Truth of Houses

by Ann Scowcroft,

London, ON: Brick Books, 2011

117 pages, $19.00

Quebec writer Ann Scowcroft has an engaging and varied collection of poems in her debut volume, The Truth of Houses. The concerns tend to the domestic, in particular motherhood, and Scowcroft has a gentle touch with difficult topics such as child abuse.

The poems range widely from focussing on young sons to aging relatives to romantic love. But he primary topic is motherhood, and in the section “(Palimpsest),” which is preceded by the poem “Letter to my mother” (surely connected), Scowcroft uses the technique of the palimpsest to uncover the mysterious secret of child abuse that has gone through at least two generations. The palimpsest gives the series of poems a dreamy (or perhaps nightmarish) quality in which memory fades in and out and the awfulness of abuse is approached and then retreated from—as one imagines it would be psychologically. This section has 16 poems, and they move beautifully back and forth in time and with varying degrees of concreteness.

The book has an intriguing structural device: each of the four main sections has a quotation from Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building, along with a small illustration. The first quotation alludes to the overall themes of the collection—that a certain kind of order results in buildings that “will be the forests and meadows of the human heart.” Scowcroft develops the concept somewhat in revers: that the human heart becomes the housing we inhabit. Sometimes the housing fails us, but the truth will out sooner or later. In “(Palimpsest)” a mother and daughter discover that they have been assaulted by the same man. Instead of delving into the reasons why the daughter is not warned, the two simply move on as there isn’t really anything they can say. The daughter expects her revelation to result in an apology; instead the mother confesses her own trauma. The speaker notes:

What she said instead was, He did that to me too.

The moment during which all oxygen

departed the planet only seemed long. I’ve

                        never told anyone that, she added.

Scowcroft ends the exchange in a surprising but utterly believable way.

The poems about the speaker’s own sons manage to stay tough and unsentimental while retaining the loving concern the mother has. When one child cuts open his knee and needs stitches, the mother considers the response of the tired emergency room doctor, and then goes on to wonder how long it will be that her son seeks her protection:

[ . . . ] When will it stop, this

abject, necessary collapse against my chest,

how many more times will he accept this intimate comfort

before his body closes around itself in its perfection[.]

And naturally, she wonders in another poem how she can promise to protect him, and she comes to the realization that all she can do is “open [her] mouth, / and believe.”

The book is a bit uneven. “Rough translation of Ronsard’s Mignonne” doesn’t quite fit, and some of the poems could use tightening, but overall, the variety and delicate pacing demonstrate a writer in control of her material.