Bridging Distances: Ruth Park’s *A Power of Roses* (1953)

he title of Ruth Park's 1953 novel, A Power of Roses, diverges from such familiar sayings as 'stop and smell the roses', 'no bed of roses', 'coming up roses', or 'rose among thorns'.What is the 'power' ascribed to 'roses'?Given the narrative's attention to Irish ancestry and the Irish diaspora, perhaps Park's title obliquely conjures the mythic 'black rose' of Ireland.In W.B. Yeats's early poetry, the rose signifies both his muse Maud Gonne and Ireland itself.Yeats's rose is a consolatory symbol, signalling constancy and endurance through historical suffering while summoning the ancient past, binding it into the present. 1 The idea that Park's title invokes the Yeatsian Irish rose might seem farfetched, except when one considers the context in which the eponymous phrase appears.The phrase belongs to the quintessential Irishman Uncle Puss (Percival McKillop), one of the novel's two central characters.It arises in conversation with a stranger, a young migrant working on the Sydney Harbour Bridge who, in response to Puss's questions, says all his family were ' killed in Amsterdam.A long time ago.'Though the young man's ancestry is obscure, this detail hints at the devastating reach of the Holocaust into the Netherlands. 2Puss 'heard the loneliness in the young man's voice.He looked up to see the 1 See W.B. Yeats's second collection, The Rose (1893), for such poems as 'The Rose Upon the Rood of Time', 'The Rose of Battle' and 'To Ireland in the Coming Times'.The 'black rose' as metaphor for Ireland is exemplified by 'Risn Dubh' ('Little Dark Rose') a political song derived from a traditional love song, according to the Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B3is%C3%ADn_Dubh_(song).2 The young migrant is described, however, from Puss's perspective in terms that suggest the Australian type, with his blonde hair, deep-set, light blue eyes, sunbleached eyebrows and freckles (156).For further details about the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, see United States