POETRY BOOK
Malvern 2021
“The verses of Tomáš Roček organise a special volatile movement. Their grimaces, gestures and images seem to come from several places at once. The effect of this movement is the uncertainty that Roček directs in the transcendence of the more-than-human world of self-awareness, which is known, for example, from the experience of psychoactive substances. The essential dimensions of these verses are also the themes that permeate them: we move on a triangle with peaks in Africa, America, Europe, which is a geographical metaphor for colonialism and at the same time opening up the perspective of the global nature of the decolonization movement. The tension of the map and the territory, or the transferred immediate experience and its rationalising abstractions. In his poems, Roček forms a kind of a negative map, which prevents a clear arrangement, isolation of elements and their control. The poems become an invitation to an uncertain search for the landscape in which plants inhabit human settlements and words live their own lives, “writes Jakub Vaněk
Pando(Part of a poem)
[…]
Pando (I spread) is older than 80 thousands years.
Thousands of stalks are growing like a hair
on a chest from one root, disappearing
like monogamy and patriarchy.
Recipes for happy life,
but what about a therapy for a forest?
If the skin is soil
follicles are stalks
and the root of a body
is filled with synaptic connections
nerves and oozing sap,
the forest is growing like an eyebrow
above a planet which is the eye.
[…]
Identity is a game with numbers.
Americans plant 1.6 billion trees a year.
Wolves returned to Yellowstone park.
“Root can be like a gatekeeper
who has complete control.”
Pando is a single living organism
by identical genetic markers
it occupies 43 hectares and is
estimated to weigh 6 tonnes.
On fingers: Tunisian War of Independence,
Rhodesian Bush War, Indonesian National
Revolution, Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, Umkhonto we Sizwe,
Majeerteen Sultanate, Sultanate of Hobyo, Warsangali
Sultanate, Dervish State, Ethiopian Civil War, Ogaden War,
Eritrean War of Independence, Spear of the Nation,
Sharpeville massacre and I Am still Prepared to Die.
[…]