Generations (Penguin Poets)

Generations (Penguin Poets)

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. If only one word could be used describe Rogers' poetry, it would have to be cosmic because her ravishingly lyrical and imaginative poems embrace the vastness and interlocking wonders of the universe. Rogers' newest collection is positively stellar in its radiant beauty, fractal patterning, and uplifting vision of life's unity. Conjuring worlds within worlds as she draws our attention to the electron as well as the moon, she brilliantly evokes the perpetual orbiting, revolving, and spinning that generate everything from light to life's myriad forms to our sense of the sacred. By turns metaphysician and naturalist, spiritual pilgrim and trickster, Rogers writes with grand precision about weather, animals, plants, and landscape, but she is most concerned with revealing all that is hidden by composing brain-teasing juxtapositions that echo the paintings of Magritte and M. C. Escher. A spiral staircase morphs into a "galactic spiral"; a man riding a bicycle becomes an entire universe. "Earth and human together / form a unique being," Rogers observes, a profound bond she explicates in language as clear as starlight and alluring as flowers. A much-honored poet with a crucial perspective and universal appeal, Rogers belongs in every poetry collection and at the head of every must-read list. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Pattiann Rogers has published fourteen books of poetry; two book-length essay collections, The Dream of the Marsh Wren and The Grand Array ; and A Covenant of Seasons , poems and monotypes, in collaboration with Joellyn Duesberry.  She is the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for poetry.  In 2018 she was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry.  She lives in Colorado.