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Geometry of the Odd

by Stan Rogal

Stan Rogal’s fourth book of poems opens with an “introduction” by Andrew Marvell, who, as he explains, has been “summoned” to comment on Rogal’s manuscript. The 17th-century ghost offers a textbook definition of metaphysical verse – “[Rogal’s] work is rife with arresting and original images and conceits” – and welcomes the Toronto poet into his own circle. The passage is amusing, and, if Rogal welcomes the comparison, it fits. Mind you, it’s an odd fit.

In two ways, Rogal, a poet and playwright, whose face would be at home in an Elizabethan portrait, is of Marvell’s tribe. Rogal’s intellect bores into the world and manufactures startling conceits. And, like his forbears, his tone at its most highly wrought can seem clinical – his poems more like diagrams on a blackboard than whispers in your ear. Rogal is less an Enlightenment thinker, however, than a quantum theorist; he’s at home with chaos and doesn’t want to explain it away. Thus, his poems tend to be oblique and slightly confounding, his rapid changes of thought suggesting the disorder of raw perception and the fractious noise of the mind itself. “The more the focus,” he states in an elegy to jazzman Miles Davis, “the more the melody breaks.”

Rogal’s mental weather often starts from a very traditional place – an eclogue, a love poem – and wanders off through many asides. The effect is both distracting and alluring, with wordplay, anagrams, and lines like brief ruminative essays embodying his restlessness. As with the metaphysical poets before him, Rogal conjures the complexity of the world within the reflecting pool of the poem, a world both described and declawed, the poem “a manageable form of the terrifying.”

While they occasionally veer into chilly discursiveness, the poems reward multiple readings with their subtle, latent imagery and repeated phrases that resonate elegantly throughout the book. For Rogal, there is no nature or love except that which is “adulterate” – humanized, mixed up, messed with. The only inviolable thing is sex, the “‘Ah’ / & ‘Ah’ / & ‘Ah,’” which is, and has always been, the thinker’s way out of the cerebral.

 

Reviewer: Devin Crawley

Publisher: Wolsak and Wynn Publishers

DETAILS

Price: $14

Page Count: 88 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-919897-63-0

Released: Aug.

Issue Date: 1999-10

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, Poetry