Interpreting and criticising poetry is infinitely more subjective than other genres. As a reader, I am drawn toward heat, toward what might be called the confessional. I take pleasure in the so-called difficult conversations, whereby I might understand the (my) human condition through another’s self-revelation. My personal biases and proclivities haunt any review that I write. The ‘I,’ my eye, is enmeshed. Where Buck’s poetry debut speaks to me by way of affective resonances, I must work harder to find an affinity with Peter Rose’s seventh poetry collection, Attention, Please! Rose is something of a literary institution unto himself with his two-plus decades at the helm of the Australian Book Review. Sad Girl — who identifies with Buck’s phrase “I think / I am historically constituted / to be a bitch” (‘No-entry curving corridor,’ 48) — whispers over my shoulder, Remember: he ghosted the pitch you sent to ABR. I order her to be quiet: ABR’s abhorrence of the vertical pronoun in criticism doesn’t suit the critic who foregrounds embodied subjectivity. Who’s being snarky now?
As an introduction to Rose, I listen to a recent ABR podcast in which a handful of esteemed readers speak to Rose’s continuing legacy and read aloud a selection of his poems. The special concludes with Rose discussing ‘Valley Forge,’ a poem in his latest collection which arose from wondering how he would respond if “some cruising Mephistopheles offered […] relief from the tyranny of dreams and memory?” (1:06:33). This sort of Faustian pact made Rose think of Peter Porter’s poem ‘Your Attention Please’ which was published around the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Porter’s poem — in the guise of an emergency broadcast warning of imminent nuclear strike — advises listeners that the capsules in their “No. 1 Survival Kit” marked “Valley Forge” will offer “painless death.” In the ABR podcast, Rose puts on the emotionless, authoritarian voice of Porter’s emergency transmitter as he reads his poem-cum-PSA ‘Valley Forge.’ Only in enunciating the poem’s ironies does Rose invite a humorous inflection into his carefully modulated oracularity. Here is where I warm to Rose: seeing how playful, ironical and theatrical is his performance of this speculative scenario. The ‘Valley Forge’ poem-announcement warns:
Oblivion is our sole promise— to rid the patient of everything that makes life colourful but pathological: despair, terror, guilt, trauma, memory. Life will be duller (almost a blur) but it won’t wake you up at 3 am. You will have fewer associates, but they might listen to you. (9)
The blurb for Rose’s Attention, Please! states that the poems continue “in the style of ribald Latin master Catullus.” I read Rose’s 2025 release one time through and assign myself homework to better understand the context before rereading. I keep wondering, where is the bawdy passion which ‘ribald’ suggests? I borrow Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet by Daisy Dunn from the library and, although I am not gifted any drugs, I am served a dish of horny history. Gaius Valerius Catullus was born in Verona to a wealthy family — his father was friends with Caesar — in approximately 82 or 84 BC (depending which text you consult) and died at age thirty. Dunn describes how the “poems intended to satisfy his lust slipped easily into poems that incited him to act on it” (58); Catullus hoped that if he delivered these poems to the man or woman he desired, passion would similarly incite. Catullus addressed many missives to ‘Lesbia,’ his Sapphic code name for Clodia Metelli, who was married to a powerful politician. To Lesbia he would write: “Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred / Then another thousand, then a second hundred” (Poem 5, qtd. in Dunn). While Catullus’s poems to Lesbia are more erotic than explicit, poems addressed with spurious critics in mind — such as this one to his denouncers Aurelius and Furius — demonstrate an antagonistic dick-swagger:
I shall fuck you anally and orally Cock-in-mouth Aurelius and sodomite Furius, Since you judge me by my short poems Because they are sexy, not pure enough. (Poem 16, qtd. in Dunn)
Quite modestly, Walter K. Kelly’s 1854 translation of The Poems of Catullus and Tibulus delivers that first line, from the Latin ‘Pœdicabo et irrumabo,’ as “I will trim you and trounce you” (20). I start to suspect that what is ‘ribald’ in Rose’s collection may be trussed up in old-fashioned language like Kelly’s and has gone over my head.
I take Rose’s Rattus Rattus into a hot bath to soak up the vibe of Rose’s first four poetry collections. Fuck fuck fuck where are the drugs? / Sad Girl, I blame you! As I (soberly?) traverse the poems, which span from Rose’s 1990 debut The House of Vitriol through 2005, I am struck by Rose’s linguistic dexterity, artful elocution, and vibrant descriptors of the world around him. Excepting, for the most part, the poems which are elegiac in nature or enact a Catullan persona, I keep wondering: where is Rose in relation to each vividly painted vignette? My thoughts return to Anna Poletti’s writing on self-life-inscription, wherein the writing of ‘self’ accounts also for the assemblage of objects and attachments which give life meaning. Poletti writes: “the things that give life meaning are fundamental to how we find a place in the social field, and what opportunities for survival and thriving are open to us” (123). Where Sholto Buck’s assembled influences are mostly contemporary and accessible (read: low culture; also: my jam), Rose’s constellating interests tend towards the classical and/or high-brow. Elitist, much? moans Sad Girl, who is feeling less-than after googling a bajillion erudite markers of self. Variously, the references I clocked on my first read of Attention, Please! include: “Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid” (25), “a Florentine noblewoman / painted by Ghirlandaio” (18), “Callas and her Miserere / (no Wagner today)” (14), as well as
[…] some poems of Hardy, dismissed as a ‘practitioner’ by T.S. Eliot, who was deemed ‘styptical’ by Christopher Ricks, whom I also read on Philip Larkin—Required Writing. (27)
And so on. Rose’s avatar is defined with and through cultural touchpoints that are steeped in tradition (“Old-timey,” my nine-year-old would say); these highbrow signifiers perhaps offer a sense of safety and belonging through demonstrated intellectual affinity. In ‘True confessions,’ the poet-avatar presents an unbroken laundry list of self-abatement which begins with “Unversed in Latin, / incapable of Greek” (Rattus 58). I google to keep up as Rose laments a lack of sophistication via markers of sophistication:
Like Candide’s hapless spinners Or Hulot in Guermantes I lack the front. (58)
I borrow Rose’s family memoir (no drugs) Rose Boys, which accounts both for his brother’s car accident and quadriplegia, and his father’s tenure as a Collingwood football hero and coach. I wonder if Rose’s accumulation of cultural capital isn’t a way of moving beyond the jock inheritance, or laying claim to both. Here Rose is more emotionally transparent than in his poems, acknowledging both his longings and his depressions. He writes, “To someone like me, a devotee of Henry James’s ‘temple of analysis’, unashamed of frankness, [my mother’s] reserve seems hard, too exacting for the curious and secretive alike” (19). In the wake of his brother’s accident, Rose decided to erect an emotional barrier against suffering: “Even if people thought me a bastard, a monster of detachment, I would never weep like that again. I would cope” (140).
Although Rose’s Catullan poems began years before the accident, I begin to understand his constructed avatar as offering a layer of protection from sadness. The poem, ‘Aviator,’ originally published in Rose’s The Catullan Rag, is a portrait of same-sex desire:
Evening on his skin is subtle and chemical, furtive as a connoisseur not yet emboldened, plotting future carnivals of touch, (Rattus 77)
Psychoanalytically, Catullus functions as an avatar through which Rose can express libidinous desire. The collection’s self-titled poem, ‘“The Catullan Rag” (1986–2004)’ more explicitly embodies the classical poet; it begins with the address “Lesbia, Lesbia, look at me now” and ends with “Let us consummate what the times portend. / The squalor is playing our song” (Rattus 108). In the same vein as Catullus’s insult, pœdicabo et irrumabo, aimed at his critics, Rose derides the unnamed person featured in ‘Sunday Profile’ as “Tea-addict. Nose-picker. / Weathercock. Masturbator” (110). Here is the vim, the vigour, the heat.
You have my attention now, Catullus — I mean, Rose. (That line of yours in ‘Pathology’: “Because I am always several things, / never one” (Rattus 49).) I return to the slender figure of Attention, Please! with Sad Girl, who understands the call to self-mythologise, to insert humour where one feels lack. I am more attuned, now, to the subtleties of Rose’s erotics and can appreciate his ode to a walking companion whose dog, perhaps through transference, seems to embody our narrator’s lust. This is one of the randier poems to fall outside the Catullan oeuvre:
[…] Back we went, back to your room, aromatic, near the sea, the sluggish sea, Rex, faithful slave, panting at the rear, the whole point of the exercise (it occurs to me now) being to illustrate your loose-limbed, subjugating gait. (43)
One of the most hilarious poem-portraits in Rose’s latest collection features Lesbia, who we learn in the 1993 Catullan Rag iteration has sold Catullus’s letters, and who continues to haunt his memory. ‘Canine’ reads in its entirety:
Nothing enrages Lesbia more than a dog. She hates them with a feline venom, poisons their mush when no one’s watching. It’s their slavishness that disgusts her, their drooling devotion. That’s why she goes round slandering Catullus. (65)
Sad Girl muses, Must be a cat person, that Rose.
‘Renewal’ is a moving portrait of a relationship in its death throes, addressed by Rose’s Catullus to Lesbia:
Excruciated we sat there, not even drinking, oblivious to time, gloom, the candles no longer lucid, candles that ended with a hiss. Remember what we risked, Lesbia, phrases spat out like tart plums. (51)
In ‘Hymn’, Catullus has to make do with “the current one, a lesser Lesbia” who “wails like a hypochondriac” (52). She demands sonnets and sad hymns, but
What does Catullus care about death when there are heavens he is yet to tongue? Undone by literature he reads to her and longs. (52)
The final poem in Rose’s latest collection is our Roman anti-hero’s swan song. In ‘Two Thousand and One Nights,’ he laments:
Surely it must abate soon. Catullus can’t go on writing those rubbishy poems forever. How they creak like arthritis. Surely they must dry up eventually. Year after year he pops up in journals that tolerate his fetishes, his creepy anniversaries. (72)
However, we already know that “[i]n the end everything is called poem” (Rattus, ‘Twenty Fingers,’ 162). We don our masks, we poem as verb, we paint with language, we eviscerate the haters, we uphold a longstanding tradition in which we poem whatever way we like because to poem is to live an artful existence, high or low, and to poem is to remember, to embody, to inscribe and enact what it means ‘to be’ / to inhabit / or be adjacent to.
