The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner
Poetry that is about the yearning for a moment you missed and couldn’t ruin, poetry that goes to an imagined community of real people who rightly fear the known, poetry that reverses justice, becoming the carrot with the stick taken out, poetry that comes out of bars as philosophy, that never forgets nor forgives Eliot, that is taller, that from afar can be mistaken for tomorrow and from a distance yesterday and from here neither yesterday nor tomorrow nor either proven until false nor shown to be true, poetry that is always losing the connecting verb, that arrives incognito by mistake, that, given a presupposition of well-being and confidence, resists opinions and clings instead to Werner Herzog, Bowie’s ‘Heathen’/’Reality’/’Outside’, leaving a recorded message because it’s caught in traffic wanderlust or some indeterminate clause… the binaries all left undone and untidy.
Richard Marshall on S.J. Fowler‘s The Rottweiller’s Guide to the Dog Owner.