Review by Booklist Review
If only one word could be used describe Rogers' poetry, it would have to be cosmic because her ravishingly 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. Conjuring worlds within worlds as she draws our attention to the electron as well as the moon, she brilliantly evokes the perpetual orbiting, revolving, and spinning that generate everything from light to life's myriad forms to our sense of the sacred. By turns metaphysician and naturalist, spiritual pilgrim and trickster, Rogers writes with grand precision about weather, animals, plants, and landscape, but she is most concerned with revealing all that is hidden by composing brain-teasing juxtapositions that echo the paintings of Magritte and M. C. Escher. A spiral staircase morphs into a galactic spiral ; a man riding a bicycle becomes an entire universe. Earth and human together / form a unique being, Rogers observes, a profound bond she explicates in language as clear as starlight and alluring as flowers. A much-honored poet with a crucial perspective and universal appeal, Rogers belongs in every poetry collection and at the head of every must-read list. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With this follow-up to her well-received Song of the World Becoming: New and Selected Poems 1981-2001, Rogers makes the jump from the independent Milkweed to major trade Penguin, and continues her investigations of the natural world's free fecundity, its darker side, and the endless patterns that the mind finds within them. Her speaker can exult "the scarlet blooming forth/ of claret cup cacti," see "the formless/ suggestion of what is never seen," but also, in observing a pastoral scene, note that "If god was a cow, I could slaughter him." From crows picking at remains to being asked to recall that "You were never chosen by priests to have your neck wrung and broken" as part of mummification after a natural demise, Rogers uses a matter-of-factness about death and violence across nature to connect "generations" of animals that can think and speak to those that can't, in one grand order. Some mannered phrasing ("noble sand amphipods") and long strings of predicates that put off rather than build tension for concluding insights can dilute off the immediacy of observation here, but in these 55 page-or-two meditations, Rogers often locates "the invisible red life implicit inside/ each fish suspended in still water." (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Moving from the concrete to the abstract, the 55 mostly free-verse poems in Rogers's ninth book use two different techniques. Some work with repetition, alliteration, and other figures to follow the shape of a sound until they close with an ironic turn of phrase. Echo-like, these poems only sometimes make the subliminal sense sought by Rogers (Song of the World Becoming, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book prize). Often, they seem lost in a pace that outdistances them like someone trying to run after a car. The other, more successful poems arise from their unique perspectives. Densely laid out, they contrast the big picture with minutiae. Many of them look at what can barely be seen "the fragment of a nonexistent motion" and tease out a philosophical subtlety in a manner reminiscent of work by A.R. Ammons. Yet while Ammons grounded his poems in specific details, Rogers allows her poems to rise gracefully on their disembodied voices like smoke signals. Recommended for all libraries. C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
