Yes, Rohrer’s poems are quirky and strange. It’s fitting that the narrator is jealous of birds: “How they get to fly. We float and rise and swim and come down. Revenge in its little heart.” How can a poem like this not remind you of the toys that you have lost or broken, sent cartwheeling down the basement stairs? What I guess I’m trying to say, is that Rohrer manages to be as playful as he is sentimental-yet all the while unsettling, “I was thinking of mustard gas / eating at the lungs of people / trapped on a ship floating / adrift on the sea.” The movement is dream, or trancelike. It ends, of course, explosively, “from each little piece / of the Earth a toy spaceship lifts off. In one of my favorites, “A Toy Spaceship Called Almond Chicken,” Almond Chicken battles two worthy foes, Mega Gun and the Disasteroid. “If You Saw Me You’d be Swallowed by a Yellow Bus,” begins, and continues, “and regurgitated by flowers, / but I am hidden in / the sky I am hidden in peace,” and later, “a gaunt figure beckons you / but he is awful you run / you stumble in your coat.” Rohrer admits to being surprised, and also delighted, by how mundane a few of the titles turned out. The poems are untethered to person or place, like balloons like snipped ribbons, like “a few more polkas disappeared / into the evening air.” They can take the shape of childhood daydreams, or night terrors. I never once imagined myself in Brooklyn, where Rohrer lives and where the collection was perhaps written. For me it was the suburbs I moved away from when I was six. And the dislocated-ness of each poem allows the reader to choose their own landscapes to place themselves in. But they always do, to some extent or another, once the poem is all said and done. Unsurprisingly, many of them are odd, teetering at the edge of making sense. In the afterword, Rohrer reveals how the title of each poem was born-in a bedside notepad, the poet not yet quite awake, phrases pieced together in a hypnagogic state. Each line has been expertly trimmed, each poem has the effect of a monochromatic garden you might peruse with a cold drink to your lips-a place to appreciate the day and breathe in the moment. Although these poems are less so busy streets, more often narrow trails. The danger didn’t occur to me, how carefully we must have crossed four-lane intersections. Rohrer’s poems remind me of riding inside a bicycle trailer as a toddler-my father steering us across the town while I ate goldfish with a goofy helmet on-the passing world both stark and ephemeral, fleeting joys glimpsed through a plastic window. The Sky Contains the Plans, the latest poetry collection by Matthew Rohrer, is a heavy-eyed meandering through a field of strange blue light.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |