Quickening Fields

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. 

Advance Praise for Quickening Fields

“No one better expresses the sensory world—its sublimity, and the flood of the tactile that so stirs us—than Pattiann Rogers. She is a virtuoso of exactitude, celebrating both the fabric of nature and its spiritual evocations. Her open-eyed love of the physical, indoors and out, is catching.” —Marvin Bell

Pattiann Rogers has published twelve books of poetry and two book-length essay collections, The Dream of the Marsh Wren and The Grand Array: Writings on Nature, Science, and Spirit. She is the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2005 Literary Award in Poetry from the Lannan Foundation. She lives in Colorado.