Destroyer and Preserver

"The imagination thinks/ in phrases but the universe/ is a long sentence." In fact, in the face of that rampant universe, there's only so much the imagination can do; life just escapes: "No one can say remember that cloud/ we saw in college/ it's still there let's go see it again"; even hot water is "like a dream behind the yellow gloves." We live in fragments, embedded in here and now but hardly touching it. Having managed the chores, we "fall backwards into bed at night" without a glimmer of what else is there: "all the people rounded up in camps/ have a look in their eyes/ that can't reach us now." Such is Rohrer's world, but it's not entirely a bad one; these poems, spilling forward with relentless musicality (aided by the frequent absence of punctuation and capitalization), aren't dark or sour. The speaker makes his quiet yet not desperate adjustments to everyday demands in clear, natural, unaffected lines. Sometimes the poems feel a bit too much like the accumulation of the mundane, but just as often they hit their mark. And you have to admire a guy who can write so unselfconsciously about raising kids.