Short Conversations with Poets: Margaret Ross

Short Conversations with Poets: Margaret Ross

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 stra…