Sub Rosa

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Poet Stan Rogal and painter Jacquie Jacobs have collaborated on a book
comprising Rogal’s impressionistic responses to Jacobs’s paintings.
The pictures (nudes and flower images) are reproduced very well in this
nicely designed book. Rogal’s poems and prose poems are packed with
sound play and puns. The poems aren’t anchored very securely to the
images, because Jacobs’s work has no narrative to direct the
responses. Rogal is almost reading the pictures as Rorschach blots,
though certainly the pictures aren’t blots. The paintings stand on
their own, while the poems exist in an ambiguous space between free
association and fabulation. It’s an interesting experiment, a
variation on the ekphrastic tradition represented by Shawna Lemay and
Stephanie Bolster.