The Bursting Test

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Late in this large collection, an epigraph from Milton’s Lycidas
reminds us that The Bursting Test is basically a series of elegies, for
people Linda Rogers knows (like Al Purdy), for children and mothers and
others on this warring and epidemic-stricken planet, and perhaps for the
world itself, seemingly bent on self-destruction. In her strongest book
in years, Rogers has found a pell-mell, rushing line that careens along,
carrying the reader again and again toward a terrible awareness of how
much loss we sustain every day.

“Grief is a love affair,” says one of the poems. Collectively, they
express that kind of passion, of desire or its loss. Many poems lament
lost pasts as much as lost companions, or the losses of contemporary
war, murder, and ordinary domestic brutality. They scurry from image to
image, topic to topic, and yet their speed and waywardness never betray
their emotional core.

The poems of The Bursting Test are full to bursting with the “news
that stays news” of the day. Rogers has a fine eye for headlines and
combines them with allusions to popular culture (especially music) to
create weird and wired laments for a variety of selves. Certain songs
and phrases of perception and analysis recur throughout the text,
creating a sense of elegiac coherence that gives the book as a whole
even greater power.

This is not a poetry of fine lines, but rather of the gathering weight
of long sentences that range over whole stanzas, as in “Little Red
Shoes,” in which the shoes move from child to child in a refugee camp:
“All they can do is take the red / shoes to the next child dreaming /
the dreams of the hopelessly ill, / who leave this world in shoes / made
by angels, and they will be / hers for as long as it takes.” The
complex sorrow here is that of The Bursting Test as a whole.