Quickening Fields by Pattiann Rogers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A wonderful collection of poems by Pattiann Rogers, who has the remarkable ability to write lush language that is also precise an clear. If it has a theme, this collection speaks to the unity of all being and indeed the unity of all things, animate and inanimate, and of all things with the voice of the poet.

I don’t know how the wood thrush knows
how to match the pitch and fall of its cry
exactly to the pitch and fall the mountain ridge
makes against the evening sky….

Each round lobe of the three-leafed clover
fist perfectly into each green note
of the tree frog’s treble,and each tree frog
swells its tremolo in cylindrical bunches
of three-tones rings….

What is it that I imitate? to what structure
do I meld? my stance, my cry and mumble
fitting exactly into the chinks
and snugness of some other? What is it
that makes its own body, that finds the steps
of its own motion against the outline
of my voice?

The collection ends with the poet imagining her own “Death Vision,” something that we hope is not near even as Rogers begins her 8th decade. But even that is a vision of enfolding back into the unity in a new kind of being:

… all the deaths within deaths
that compose the body becoming as once
their own symbolic perception and praise
of river salt, blooms and breaths, strings,
strains, sun-seas of gravels and gills;
this one expression breaking, this same
expression healing.

These poems, written between 1980 and 2016, show the poet still speaking with sublime voice and vision. Read, sense, be.

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