Book Review: A Year Rewritten by Andrew Rogerson

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I’m pausing my year of reviewing Australian female writers to sneak this one in and will return to the promised reviews in August.

*****

I saw Andrew Rogerson at an open mike night where he read two poems (performed them from memory actually) and as soon as I got home, I bought this book (which he had spruiked). It’s a high concept book of poems where he wrote a haiku a day for an entire year. For those who don’t know, a haiku is a Japanese poem composed of three lines with the first line containing five syllables, the second line containing seven syllables and the third line containing another five syllables for a total of seventeen.

Sounds easy, right? Not even seventeen words, just seventeen syllables a day. (If all writers could get away with this kind of workload, they’d probably be a much happier lot.) But, of course, there’s very little about poetry that is easy, writing it or reading it.

A Year Rewritten is a very short book, necessarily because of the concept. It took less than hour to read and it’s a little like a verse novel with one obvious difference: I had no idea what the story was. There were hints of love and loss and illness but the haikus were quite obscure. Poetry like this is often difficult to interpret, so attempting to string it all together in my understanding as a linear story proved impossible.

Having said all that, there are some really lovely passages.

“What a shame that he’d

Break his ring, eat his children

And cave your roof in”

“Change how you start and

You might just change how you end”

“Those who raised me would

Swim an ocean for me or

At least take a boat”

“I fear you will die

If you keep looking for God

In bottles and beds”

“Took your breath away

But filled your lungs with the truth”

“Do that thing you do

Where you turn something off then

Turn it on again”

“When everyone hurts

You walk alongside the ones

Who can match your limp”

“Friday night I go

To bed tired and thank God I’ve

Something to tire of”

“Stop breaking your word

And you’ll find you stop breaking

Everything else too”

“Wander streets like a

People junkie vowing to

Never miss a dose”

This is a book for people who love words, not stories. Perhaps the chosen format limited the possibility of a deeper understanding but the shallow understanding I do have has left me with a sense of someone who is only just beginning to explore his own depths as a creator. Certainly, the poems Andrew Rogerson performed at that open mike night showed a writer I’d like to explore further. Since he hasn’t published anything else at this stage, I might be waiting for a little while.

In a word: promising.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 28 June 2019