August 17, 2005. Today the web magazine Poëzierapport (Poetry Report) published the wonderful review ‘On an opening line and its consequences’ by Alain Delmotte on Rozalie Hirs’ third collection of poems [Speling] (2005):
“Poetry has its own criteria for penetrating reality and translating that reality – and by these, it paradoxically expands that reality. […] But in the musical design of her collection, she presents herself rather as a choreographer. She makes the words dance. She writes poems wearing ballet shoes. She is constantly reflecting, word by word. She is bodily yet anonymously present in the creative process. […] Dancing is thinking in body language. Tinkering with sensual experience. The constructions of sensibility. And dancing is litheness, suppleness. Her poetry is curiously elastic. Her poems swing from sentence to sentence, ever faster, ever more reckless: gradually punctuation marks melt (in the prose poem ‘Way’ this in fact happens very explicitly.) More and more ‘leeway’ is gained between the multiple layers of meaning of the text and among the words. Between the written and the reader. She lays bare echoes within words and lets these echoes resonate repeatedly.”