Quickening Fields

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. (June)