Notes on Arrival and Departure

Allison Sivak is a librarian in the Science and Technology Library,
University of Alberta.

The poems of Rose’s outstanding debut, Giving My Body to Science,
presented highly personalized narratives that were often rooted in pain,
from a girl’s experience of sexual abuse and poverty to a married
Japanese woman’s suicide after the end of her affair with a young
female ESL teacher. The book ended on a warmer note: the love between
two women and the young child they were raising.

Notes on Arrival and Departure moves beyond a predominantly individual
narrative, with poems on popular culture, fairy tales, and displays at
the Musée de la Médecine, Paris. A common theme throughout these poems
is that of the female, or mother, body; Rose contrasts images of the
vulnerability of the body with those of the tightly wound, powerful, and
angry mother. The book begins with poems about the killing of child
beauty queen JonBenet Ramsay, a historical image of a woman transfused
with goats’ blood, and the vulnerability of the tongue. It then shifts
to the rage of a mare in heat and the dark allure of the shape- and
gender-shifting eel.

Many of these poems are elegiac, paying tribute to lost lovers,
memories of family, and sometimes those known only through the news,
such as the six Handel children who were strangled by their father and
burned in their home on Vancouver Island. Even those poems that
celebrate arrival mourn a simultaneous loss or change.

Rose’s tone and language are also elegiac in many of the poems, as in
“A Child’s Garden of Verses,” which streams several fairy tales
and “real stories” of children betrayed by parents together:
“Because you created them, they are yours / to destroy. You only
wanted, / you simply had to make him stop screaming. / Because you were
sure your daughter / would forgive you for the Beast. / […] Because it
was done to you once, / a long time ago, / in rooms of stone so thick /
there was no echo. / […] Because their bodies are unblemished / and
your hands are alive with pain.” A powerful book of poems.