One of the things so compelling about Margaret Ross’s Saturday is her obsessive fidelity to a purity of description: “Beige clouds in a greenish sky / seen through cheap sunglasses.” To that, she adds an instability of syntax and line break that she makes into a thing of cool beauty. Here’s a couple of stanzas at the end of “A Present,” a title whose multiple possible meanings is also a sign of Ross’s themes and capacities:
Touching certain strangers
I could feel the future just
below the surface of their skin, things
can happen, you could sense time
quicken beneath your hand.
The future? I want to know do I
hurt people because of what
they have made me feel or do I
have feelings I have always had
and try to make the world
look like it gave them to me?
The sentences, measured but already somehow headlong, roll against and over the ends of the lines. Sentences do not match the length of line. Sometimes these two elements dance, and sometimes they quarrel. Here they are dancing, at the beginning of “New York”:
