Acquiring Land: Late Poems: 17

DreamSeeker Poetry Series editor Jeff Gundy says in relation to Acquiring Land that "Jane Rohrer came late to poetry, but there is nothing belated about her marvelous new collection. These alert, inventive, expansive poems travel widely--into her memory and family history, and around the world--constantly offering up bold, moving insights and turns of phrase."

As her life expanded from Mennonite and Church of the Brethren roots in Broadway, Virginia, through marrying painter Warren Rohrer and raising sons in suburban Philadelphia to launching a late but flourishing writing career in the 1970s, Jane Rohrer became an accomplished poet.

Rohrer's publications works include a prior poetry volume, Life After Death (Sheep Meadow Press, 2002), about which Stephen Berg said, "Her idiom is so original, so plain, so authentic, it easily might be missed in the current noisy welter of media hype and inflated poetry. It's skill is absolute honesty, line after line set down because it must be."

Overviewing the current collection, its editor Julia Kasdorf Spicher reports that "The clarity of statement in the poems collected here is hard won and contains traces of the distance she's come and all she's brought with her to arrive at this brave voice." --From the Introduction

As an excerpt from Rohrer's title poem puts it, "Sixty years ago, my fiancé's parents / Were relieved he would marry a girl / Whose father owned a thousand acres. / They had their standards. / I see the Shenandoah now / Like a World War II movie, sepia toned, / And the river flows by the house someone owns. . . . / My mind is filled today / With a whiff of Lisbon in the rain."

Acquiring Land is for anyone interested in poetry that, as Rohrer's poem "Story" describes it, invite us to "recognize ourselves / as we are, everywhere at once."

Born in Broadway, Virginia, as Martha Jane Turner, to a conservative Mennonite farmer and horse breeder and a Church of the Brethren mother, Jane Rohrer met her husband Warren Rohrer when they were 1940s students at Eastern Mennonite College. During the 1950s, as Warren became a painter, they raised two sons in suburban Philadelphia. Jane's 1970s launch into writing poetry catalyzed a late but flourishing literary career. Her 2002 poetry volume Life After Death (Sheep Meadow Press) prompted Theodore Weiss to ask, Original, wonderful combination of simple direct language and subtle surreal turns of mind . . . a full-fledged poet . . . where has she been all this time?