Flickering
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- 14٫99 US$
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“[Rogers’] poems bring an openness of spirit and an almost scientific curiosity to the world at her feet, cataloging unexpected connections everywhere she looks.” —New York Times Book Review
A new collection from a poet whose “celebrations of science and approachable yet profound spiritual connection to the Earth delight, entertain, and elevate” (The Poetry Foundation)
Denise Levertov has called the poet 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.” The consistent theme In Flickering, her new collection, is the very breadth and prodigiousness of the universe itself. These wise poems, many inspired by various kinds of flickering actions in plants, animals, and natural processes, move nimbly between inner and outer worlds as Rogers addresses themes ranging from beauty, resilience and creation to the tensions and relationships between humans and wildness.
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Rogers's latest (after Quickening Fields) burnishes her reputation as a transcendental poet of science, with Emersonian grandiosity: "and the sublime universe existing.../ likewise inside the biding/ of the new moon and likewise/ inside the biding of the unknown/ existing inside the waking universe/ asleep inside the universe of the sublime." Verses of dizzying scope succumb to the gravitational pull of breathtakingly precise lines: "thumb-sized skulls of voles/ and anoles rattled by the slightest breeze, their minutely/ hinged jaws hanging open, each spine a string of slats/ thin as pine needles." In her introduction, the poet writes that she strove to make poems that would serve as "a moment escape, a settled hope, a brief assurance." The most ambitious poems exceed this aim: "What is it held within and among/ these stubs and crooked shafts,/ between what has happened and what/ has not, this trashy welter of leafy/ webs, tangles, rips, tears of torn rock?/ What is it living in these lines?" The book concludes with a section by the poet's son, a physical chemist and materials scientist, who documents the flickering of neural activity. His photographs of electrical impulses accompany snippets of Rogers's poems: "all asparkling, all aflickering, all aglow." This is a poignant homage to scientific attention and mystery.
