Logos, Rozalie Hirs’ second collection of poems, has the reader traveling through the human body. Inside the book there is an anatomical drawing, made by artist Noëlle von Eugen, by which the reader can navigate through the collection. The ‘logos’ of the title might refer to the laws of the body, of thought, the imagination, and the word. In the many love poems, the beloved turns out to be a human being of flesh and blood, and at the same time, language.
“The poems all have to do with the adventure of one’s own body, which at times evokes analogies with the world and the cosmos. Through repeated readings, one penetrates ever deeper into a fascinating universe.” Remco Ekkers, Leeuwarder Courant
“One word seems to summon the next by way of rhyme or being part together of a stock phrase. This makes Hirs’s poetry both serious and humorous, and related to that of B. Zwaal.” Eric Kok, Noord-Hollands Dagblad
digital poetry: Logos Digital
Halfway into the writing process of the poems of Logos, the frequent appearance of body parts, colors and numbers became apparent. Hirs decided to include an anatomical map within the collection, by which the reader might navigate through the book as if it were a body. The artist Noëlle von Eugen was invited to create this map. Along with the body parts, von Eugen listed abbreviations for the titles of all the poems in which that body part appears.
Since the anatomical map in fact functions as a hyper structure of the collection, it became a natural next step to present the entire collection online as well. Matt Lee programmed the site in Flash and presented the Logos website in September 2003. By following hyperlinks on the anatomical map, and within the poems, the reader can navigate directly to the poems in which the body part in question appears, and also jump from poem to poem.
The website is now available for download as an autonomous app.