In the epigraph to The Old Direction to Heaven , Jennifer Rose's inaugural collection of poems, we hear the 19th century British philosopher-novelist George Eliot praising the love of the local. The epigraph would seem to suggest that Rose, who attended the Cambridge School of Weston and Brandeis and who still lives in Waltham, has probably compiled some sort of Charles River Anthology about the sad secret lives of millhands who worked in the watch factories six days a week and picnicked on the river bank on Sunday after church. Rather than dwelling on one quaint locale and invoking the gods of the regional, Rose goes on the road in this book. She takes us straight to Europe for the initial several pages, starting out in the grimmest of tourist hotspots for the first of many meditations on history. I cannot bear to bless a German heaven.
Every chimney rises with a grudge.
The Arbeit gate swings slowly on its hinge. We might think that her departure from Europe, the theater of world wars, would bring peace or quiet or some kind of ignorant bliss to Rose's poems. North America, the taste of atrocity still stings, like saltwater in a cut, the tongue that turns these poems. The sun hovers, perfect lover, an immortelle. I browse among these bleeding hearts, still unrequited.