At once wise and achingly at a loss, Ann Scowcroft’s The Truth of Houses is an elegant 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.
Praise for The Truth of Houses:
“These are poems filled with the intricacies of life – subtle and human, anarchic and generous, intimate as well as far ranging in their time and geography. The Truth of Houses is a wonderful first collection of poems.” — Michael Ondaatje
“Ann Scowcroft’s first collection of poems astounds with its dense writing, as if the author had been accumulating, constructing her vision long enough and could hold back no longer. Oddly mesmerising in the imagery they provoke, these poems are at once intimate and universal.” — Jury Comments, Concordia University First Book Prize, Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards
