Generations
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
