Review: to the river

to the journey, to the dust, to the river
-a review and photo by Dorothee Lang of Rose Hunter’s poetry book to the river

On the floor in front my bookshelf, I sit, surrounded by books I pulled out to fix a shelf. And there it is: a book of maps, from my parents, from the time when Germany was 2 countries: “Readers Digest Weltatlas” 1965. I open it, and find, folded in it, an old map. A reprint, of course. Still, it carries the mood of a time when embarking on a journey meant: embarking into the unknown.

Next to the Weltatlas, the Lonely Planets, guides for the road. Would I travel to the States now again, I also would carry the set of travel poems with me that Rose Hunter collected in to the river. Especially when this trip included Vegas. This place I’ve been to once – I can’t remember the year, but my Lonely Planet remembers the hotel: Stardust.

So I sit, surrounded by books, and return there, in those lines that I hadn’t known back then, in a time when poetry had little to do with me:

Waiting for the bus down the road
from the Freemont Street Experience

You keep forgetting why you’re there, and look
at the sky a lot. Instead of vultures,

overhead are helicopters taking
people to the Grand Canyon –

—
Dorothee Lang, January 2010
poem: a cutting from the poem “The Cutting” by Rose Hunter, first published in Cordite, now part of the collection “to the river” (book link)

-refers from Rose Hunter’s poem Walking into the Wynn, Lass Vegas and You are Stitched Into