After measuring curiosity, protest and zest for life, the poetry, prose and photography in Was wiegen die Wolken convey resistance, anger and devotion. Having passed through many worlds, the author is concerned with the inextricable interweaving of things, living beings and forms of knowledge, as in the style of her photographic images, which seek to concentrate on the essential in calm compositions, carried by an earthy heaviness with all the love of the bizarre and absurd and yet also with hope through a longing captured in images and verse.

Rosemarie Zens continuously seeks to encompass her own writing and photography essayistically. Both forms of expression, the photographic and the poetic image, she explains, "do not merge, but can touch each other and create interstices. Through images, we encounter curiosity for the unexpected and follow the desire for existential reassurance." Associative chains of contradictory truths about the interweaving of nature and history inspire readers and viewers to fill them with their own lives. Scenarios can thus be mirrored, whereas in our dreams and reflections images resonate with images.

Press Commentaries:

A characteristic feature of this author seems to me to be the way in which a great wealth of images and references—fed by the most diverse forms of knowledge, observations and experience—is captured in a pleasantly clear language, deepened in a reflective way by the concise, roughened syntax and the precisely placed line breaks and framing, and arranged in a special composition to form a comprehensive sequence of notations.

– Reto Ziegler, Wien

Rosemarie Zens' word images and photographs are a subtly woven cosmos of myth and philosophy, of sound and movement and interwoven memories. Metaphors and references to the history of ideas carry melodiousness and a certain brittleness, in which image follows image and, for all the closeness to nature that is evident in "fresh pine cones / fibrous cirrus clouds" or mountain formations, geological and physical concepts also emerge: "Surfing electrons / riding on plasma waves / bending aluminum foils // using particle cannons / to accelerate protons / "... The shared destiny of man and nature—their strength, threat and endangerment—are revealed at certain points. As in dream sequences, they follow their own logic of perception, in which participation in an infinite, which is measure and rhythm, is expressed in the formal will of the pictorial compositions. A narrative-elegiac tone emphasizes the existential forlornness of man and, in a reverberating exchange, forges a new bond with nature in accordance with its historical and creaturely consistencies.

– lyrikwelt.de

Further information

Author: Rosemarie Zens

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