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Poems exploring the idea of home and the difficulties of a deeply ambiguous relationship to that word.
At once wise and achingly at a loss, Ann Scowcroft's The Truth of Houses is an elegant and honest debut collection. While very intimate—even startlingly intimate at times—the voices of these poems are constantly taking a step backward, wrestling for a measure of distance and perspective. Reading them, we eavesdrop on the uncovering of a personal vernacular that might allow the present to be better lived; we have the sense of overhearing a particular yet eerily familiar inner struggle—a struggle for insight, for an equanimity with which both narrator and fortunate reader might re-enter life anew.
"All of which is to say: the houses aren't fooled
the houses know the five truths
The truth of light: you will see before you understand
The truth of motion: escape is an illusion
The truth of trees: your busy life will dissolve into the soil
The truth of windows: what protects can also maim
The truth of peace:
despite all the other truths
knowing will come to you wearing one hundred faces
contain you as once you contained your
own blood"
—from "The Truth of Houses"
Ann Scowcroft has been a professional writer and editor for many years, and was an academic for a few. She has a PhD in Applied Linguistics and presently works in the field of humanitarian assistance. Quebec is home base. The Truth of Houses is her first book.