Quickening Fields
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- ¥1,800
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry
A new collection by an award-winning poet who “presents her apprehensions of the natural world with striking accuracy and emotional impact” (Orion Magazine)
Denise Levertov has called 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.” Quickening Fields gathers fifty-three poems that focus on the wide variety of life forms present on earth and their unceasing zeal to exist, their constant “push against the beyond” and the human experience among these lives. Whether a glassy filament of flying insect, a spiny spider crab, a swath of switch grass, barking short-eared owls, screeching coyotes, or racing rat-tailed sperm, all are testifying to their complete devotion to being. Many of the poems also address celestial phenomena, the vision of the earth immersed in a dynamic cosmic milieu and the effects of this vision on the human spirit. While primarily lyrical and celebratory in tone, these poems acknowledge, as well, the terror, suffering, and unpredictability of the human condition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
