Quickening Fields

May 15, 2017
With this harmonious and lyrical confluence of science, sex, nature, and myth, poet and essayist Rogers (Holy Heathen Rhapsody) fills a distinctive void in modern writing. Her work holds fast to well-developed roots. These poems, composed between 1980 and 2016, fulfill a primordial urge of verse: to express awe at the world. Lines ring with an exuberant sense of wonderment: “hasn’t the moon copied perfectly the lake’s dark/ dream of possessing a circular stone of brilliance/ in each and every wave?” In Rogers’s world—a linguistic landscape that encompasses everything from “tundra foliage” to “Lacewings, locust, and laurel”—nature hums in rhythm with the spiritual. Within this perspective, something as simple as moss “could comfort the world/ with their ministries,” while daylight is seen as a “repeating savior.” Just as the spiritual connects to disparate moments of natural revelation, so does the physical. Rogers describes sex, for example, as “the universal horse nuzzling and breathing/ at the crotch.” Here, poetry does not need to break boundaries or insist on novelty: “The creation of the reality existing on this page/ could possess the ghost of a salvation, a ghost rising/ into everlasting fact by its own skeleton of light.” Rogers’s poems flourish as essential experiences of wonder, as prayers.

Starred review from June 15, 2017

This newest volume of poems from Rogers (Holy Heathen Rhapsody) continues her journey as a poet of nature, an observational writer whose work is deeply rooted in poems about God, the earth, and its creatures. Not a religious poet per se, she is a writer who finds God in reflections of life, human or otherwise, whether she speaks of family or chasms of ice or the sun after it rains. "Who is it who makes music/ with falling stars of water? Who is it who/ tunes the art of benevolence?" Rogers's language can be crisp and specific or languid and luxurious, whether she speaks of polar bears or winter camping or stars congregating in a mountain lake. "They are ancestors/ of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes/ of the night. What can they know?" VERDICT What readers will know throughout these poems is how deeply Rogers sees, how humanely she views the world above, below, and the spaces that reside between her. "Still ...catch that ring/ of blossoms, lift it up, wear/ its beauty.... Look into a mirror./ See what you can see."--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

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