Scion

Each careful word in these layered, honed and elegant poems counts. Writing about her debut collection, From the Dark Room, Gillian Clarke described the work as ‘truthful, brave and tender.’ In this third collection, Rose takes this compassionate yet unflinching sensibility to look at ancestry and legacy. Can you see the ghost of my mother’s hook nose in the subtle snub of my face? Rose asks in the title poem, before going on to investigate the many ways in which the ‘godless’ and ‘faithless’ both carry an ineluctable inheritance whilst ‘not being Jewish enough’. But this is no theoretical musing. Legacy here also looks at the pain of so many human losses, from the absence of a child to bereavement, from the deep injuries of history to those of our own bodies. Framed by the dark, there is always the light of a life’s pulse that insists: ‘Let us sing and be glad.’