This book was highlighted in a recent New York Times Book Review and since I had never heard of the author, I took it out of the library. What a great discovery and a reminder that no matter how much one reads, there are important authors and poets out there who await one’s attention.

Rogers, now an 83 year old, has published 15 books of poetry and two collections of essays. Her work generously combines science and wonder in poems without rhyme or other poetic structure, but with great effect.  The recipient of the Lanaan Literary Award in 2018 and the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Poetry, she’s been represented in five Pushcart Prize volumes and twice in the  Best American Poetry series.

This book is full of beauty, curiosity, spirituality, and words, words, words.  It is Rogers’ struggle to translate her awe and wonder into words that provides the energy that powers these poems.  In her poem ‘Amiss’ she concludes this poem about the challenge of describing a great horned owl now that he has flown away.  She write “Irretrievable to me now are the words I need/to create his song. Impossible without his presence.”  In her poem entitled, ‘Celeste, at the Campfire’ in which a friend describes a close encounter with a grizzly bear, Rogers writes “I might have smiled, opened my own arms shaking/in welcome, knowing I was mistaken, knowing/I was wrong, willfully misunderstanding.  I might/even have thrown my head back toward the sky,/bared my neck, an offering.”

My favorite poem in the volume is one entitled ‘Homo sapiens: Creating Themselves.”  The first stanza begins as follows: “Formed in the black light center of a star-circling/galaxy; formedin whirlpool images of froth/and flume and fulcrum; in the center image of herring/circling like pieces of silver swirling fast, a shoaling/circle of deception; in the whirlpool perfume of sex/in the deepest curve of a lily’s soft corolla. Created/within the images of the creator’s creation.”  That’s great writing!

I intend to read some of her earlier volumes to further enjoy her passion and wonder as she encounters nature in all its beauty and mystery.