Rogue Intensities

“A season, a season, year on year, no rest in flowering, fruiting, dangerous world.”

“From footprints that cross and recross, from curlicued vines on a trellis-stave, through lens-droplets and in the opacity of milk I read my story.”

“I dream a big plane, a bomber perhaps, that turns and returns low over the gridlocked panic of a city at war, cumbersome and deliberate as a blowfly. It's so close I can see the dents in its silver underbelly. I dreamed ruined boys, so far removed from manhood that they fixate on cruelty, as if the pain and fear they cause or merely witness could give them power. Nightly, my mind catalogues my fears as strife gathers its grievous attendants and soldiers take to the street. Of course this is my own internal landscape too. How to be with it.”


Rogue Intensities is a diary entry for each month over five years. Diarist/poet Angela Rockel lives on a farm in Tasmania and has a curious and philosophical mind. Each entry is a seamless blend of her observations on farm life, nature, ecology, history, mythology and even her family history.
“Rogue intensities roam the streets of the ordinary” said Kathleen Stewart in her book, Ordinary Affects. Angela took this statement and wrote with intensity about her own thoughtful roguish roamings. “I am taken all in deep.” she wrote. Indeed.

Such a book of strange beauty, highly recommended.