Holy Heathen Rhapsody

Praise

Praise for Holy Heathen Rhapsody

“An impassioned, carefully conceived collection that reaffirms Rogers’s long-standing devotion to poetry about the natural world . . . Precise details ground the poems and show Rogers to be a rigorous observer.  With great craft and care, she presents her apprehensions of the natural world with striking accuracy and emotional impact . . . this buoyant collection nudges us to think ourselves closer into nature, acknowledging a more blended, intertwined mass.” – Lisa Williams, Orion

“Rogers’s poems inspire a feeling of transcendence in using language to create a riotous sense of abandon and a joyous pleasure upon experiencing blooming, burgeoning nature at all sides . . . [they] propose a mechanism to rediscover an essential, compassionate regard of self and nature.” – World Literature Today

Praise for Pattiann Rogers:

“If only one word could be used to describe Rogers’ poetry, it would have to be cosmic because her ravishing 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… By turns metaphysician and naturalist, spiritual pilgrim and trickster, Rogers writes with grand precision about weather, animals, plants, and landscape.”
—Donna Seaman, ALA Booklist, on Generations (2004)

“Rogers celebrates and embraces the physical, sensual world—its plentitude, fecundity, voluptuousness, and variety—the gross and rank as well as the most exquisite beauty.… For the intense fusing of thought and feeling, along with the juxtapositions of wit, the erotic, and the spiritual questing, which are characteristic of her work, one would have to go back to the English metaphysical poets.”
—Robert Buttel

“If angels were to agree upon a language to describe creation, a tone of voice and a point of view that would adequately celebrate the divine, these would be the poems they would write. In language that is precise and accurate, with a tenacious heart and a penetrating eye, Pattiann Rogers beatifies. She exposes the dizzying dimensions of earthly space and incants the swoon of physical love. If this is not poetry in service to humanity, I do not know what it is.”
—Barry Lopez

“I believe Pattiann Rogers walks the world at night when we are sleeping. Her poems are translations of our dreaming life—what we know to be true but fail to remember. We read her words, sentence by sentence, image by image, and return to all that is beautiful, mysterious, and erotic.”
—Terry Tempest Williams

“Pattiann Rogers is 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. Her language, unmarred by clichés, springs up out of a sense of how various and endlessly amazing are the forms of life and the human ability to notice them.”
—Denise Levertov

“How the densely detailed, thickly textured, imaged stanzas of Pattiann Rogers result in so much light-as-air wonderment is surely one of the greater questions—one of the greater magics—of contemporary poetry. But however it happens, we must be thankful—for both the science text and the psalter of her work, for both the physical abundance and for the spirit flimmering over it.”
—Albert Goldbarth