Synopses & Reviews
New work from an award-winning poet who writes transporting poems of discovery, contemplation, and gratitude” (Booklist) Pattiann Rogers has won acclaim as one of the most original voices in contemporary American poetry. The poems in her new collection, Holy Heathen Rhapsody, embrace and embody the forces of the Earth and the creative power of its lifeforms in all the wildness of their varieties. Love in these poems is a force infused with the same creative power and intensity, the purest manifestation of the will-to-be. This vision and its making contend that even a shadow or a floating seed, a frond of green or a midnight spider, even a mongrel dog, wind over water, the human voice, the human witness, peace and weapons, allevery aspect and feature encounteredare fully endowed players in the dynamic music of the Earth.
Review
Praise for Pattiann Rogers: “If only one word could be used to describe Rogers’ poetry, it would have to be cosmic because her ravishing lyrical and imaginative poems embrace the vastness and interlocking wonders of the universe. Rogers’ newest collection is positively stellar in its radiant beauty, fractal patterning, and uplifting vision of life’s unity… By turns metaphysician and naturalist, spiritual pilgrim and trickster, Rogers writes with grand precision about weather, animals, plants, and landscape.”
—Donna Seaman, ALA Booklist, on Generations (2004)
“Rogers celebrates and embraces the physical, sensual world—its plentitude, fecundity, voluptuousness, and variety—the gross and rank as well as the most exquisite beauty.… For the intense fusing of thought and feeling, along with the juxtapositions of wit, the erotic, and the spiritual questing, which are characteristic of her work, one would have to go back to the English metaphysical poets.”
—Robert Buttel
“If angels were to agree upon a language to describe creation, a tone of voice and a point of view that would adequately celebrate the divine, these would be the poems they would write. In language that is precise and accurate, with a tenacious heart and a penetrating eye, Pattiann Rogers beatifies. She exposes the dizzying dimensions of earthly space and incants the swoon of physical love. If this is not poetry in service to humanity, I do not know what it is.”
—Barry Lopez
“I believe Pattiann Rogers walks the world at night when we are sleeping. Her poems are translations of our dreaming life—what we know to be true but fail to remember. We read her words, sentence by sentence, image by image, and return to all that is beautiful, mysterious, and erotic.”
—Terry Tempest Williams
“Pattiann Rogers is a visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed. Her language, unmarred by clichés, springs up out of a sense of how various and endlessly amazing are the forms of life and the human ability to notice them.”
—Denise Levertov
“How the densely detailed, thickly textured, imaged stanzas of Pattiann Rogers result in so much light-as-air wonderment is surely one of the greater questions—one of the greater magics—of contemporary poetry. But however it happens, we must be thankful—for both the science text and the psalter of her work, for both the physical abundance and for the spirit flimmering over it.”
—Albert Goldbarth
Synopsis
A lively new collection from one of America's most celebrated contemporary poets Denise Levertov has called acclaimed poet Pattiann Rogers "a visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed." In her new collection, Rogers takes the reader on an exploration of human endeavor. Full of color and action, wonder and fear, these poems investigate, reflect upon, and create experiences relative to music, art, and theater, as well as to the universe and its creatures, large and small. They are distinguished by the penetrating vision and avid imagination that have made Rogers one of today's most outstanding poets.
Synopsis
Pattiann Rogers, one of America’s finest contemporary poets, has won a reputation for densely detailed, thickly textured poems describing the natural world and one’s place in it that are informed by a broad knowledge of science. In the tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and A. R. Ammons, Rogers’s wise and complex poems read like a series of witty but deeply felt explorations of the physical world and the presence of the divine, exuding much observational care and descriptive panache. Her new collection, Generations, consists of fifty-four poems that concern themselves not just with the notion of the generations of life, but “generations” in the sense of energy, change, replication, and continuity—the entire process of coming or bringing into being.
About the Author
Pattiann Rogers has published eleven books of poetry; two book-length essay collections, The Dream of the Marsh Wren and The Grand Array; and A Covenant of Seasons, poems and monotypes, in collaboration with Joellyn Duesberry. She is the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for poetry. She lives in Colorado.