Part of, and Apart

By John Stout

Ruth Roach Pierson's Aide-mémoire stages the self in its complex engagements with history and memory. Pierson's poems are elegant, skillfully crafted and brimming with carefully selected details drawn from everyday life, both historically specific and personally referential. Each poem in Aide-Mémoire exists between present and past experience and attempts to chart a relationship between the two. As Pierson is a retired history professor, her gravitation toward “real” subject matter is more than fitting. I wonder why she has chosen poetry, rather than the novel, for her excavation of the relationship between present and past? How has poetry allowed her to pursue this task differently from what the novel would have permitted/required her to do?

I find a certain ambiguity in all the poems of Aide-Mémoire: Is the speaker in these poems merely reliving moments from the past? Or is she mainly experiencing a “transformed” relation to these moments from the past via poetic language?

In “A Foreign Tongue” (30), she writes: "The past / is another country, someone once said. / And the past self, it seems, a stranger / who spoke a foreign tongue.” She then adds: “I try to recall / the vernacular of that nimble-footed self.” I find this metaphor of the past (self) as/in a “foreign tongue” intriguing. Pierson amplifies the metaphor through the inclusion of a number of words in German in her poems. The use of non-English words and the shifts in place (to England, to Russia, to Italy ... ) accentuate the differences separating the speaker of the poems from the past(s) which she evokes.

And yet, beyond the many differences that define Pierson's poetic world, a unified focus is discernible in Aide-Mémoire: memory constantly opens up a world to us. However, an uncertainty arises about our capacity to cannot control that world: “What determines / which facts are sent packing, which / granted permanent residence? Psychology, I'm sure, / has an answer. But its architraves escape me" (40).

So, finally, for Pierson, personal and historical memory is a part of us and yet it is also stands apart from us. From this contradictory, difficult relationship to the past, she has created poems that are, themselves, memorable—and pleasurable.

Afternote

Since I wrote this piece in 2010, I find that Pierson's Aide-Mémoire comes to my mind fairly often. The elegant way in which the poet is able to address issues of subjectivity, memory—especially the changes in one's sense of self which occur over time—makes her text resonate. It also interests me that so many images in poems have been retrieved from memories, often imperfectly or in a transformed guise. Pierson is taking on fundamentally important issues for poetry in Aide-Mémoire. — John Stout