Six Poems
I wish the power lines really did hum,
the remnant fields rolling like
fractured stormy seas, I wish
I were incarnate most of the time,
milk-crates, ball courts, I hang
heavy on the bush like late-summer
tomatoes
you say that you know me
isn’t this unfathomable, like
the outer reaches of some temporal galaxy
do you see my sputtering stars?
By Dan Hoopes.
Pretty Vacant
The lack of location-specificity is an important element of Vacant Lot, which the French title Terrain Vague articulates more clearly than the English translation. Like the fiction of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, Rohe’s novella detaches itself from any realist location and situates itself instead in an inner-monologue, locatable in a more generalised sense to wars across time-frames and regions, and which has particular resonance right now, in present wars and present unrest. The narrative is not in fact located anywhere except the imagined consciousness of a figure who is detested and detestable, but lonely and irrelevant.
Colin Herd reviews Oliver Rohe‘s Vacant Lot.