On the photos in Björkevägen:
For all the relative absence of people, they give a rich sense of an inhabited environment, and, if the lack of people shivers a bit with a Bergman-like austerity, even alienation, the pictures also convey a comfortably unforced hominess (including what's sometimes mis-tagged homeliness). For me the photographs resonate with a feature of much poetry of the last hundred or so years: the use of, rather than traditional "full" rhyme, what's variously called slant, half, partial or para-rhyme. Those rhymes keep the capacity of traditional rhyme to emphasize, complicate, or contradict a point while also putting such strategies under interrogation or into doubt. I think/feel your pictures often do something similar. They rhyme colors, shapes, objects, and so on without insisting on but still suggesting a kind of friendly likeness, so that, say, the triangles of sailboat riggings (implying motion, departure, return) echo the roof lines of houses or other buildings (implying stability and permanence). The pictures are also often witty, even funny, better, humorous: the big baby, at once pacific and threatening; the road sign that points in a direction no car can manage; the tipsy clown alongside what appears to be a vulgar term in English; the ladder that's failed the verticality trees come by naturally; the handicapped parking sign that seems to comment on its fallen partner; and so on. Well, enough of that. There are moments, too, for me, of all but unironic, nearly transcendent beauty: the stunning photo of the mountain ash-like tree reaching up- and outward before and centered against the down-sloping roof curve and pale green wall of the building, kept from mere prettiness by the offsetting (offputting?), more utilitarian white structure to the left, as by the comment of trees and grass "against" the more kempt lawn in the foreground. Delightful work. - Guy Rotella, Professor Emeritus of English, Northeastern University, writer, poet