Park in the Dark reminds us of what it
feels like to love and depend on a place, a
home. If you want to experience some
sense of this communion, head over to
Central Park at sunset. Look for a group
gathered under an owl’s tree. “Your binoculars are all the credentials you need.”
— Kathleen Yale
Wayfare
by pattiann rogers
Penguin, 2008. $18, 128 pages.
“YOU WILL REMEMBER afterward /
that you were simple at >rst, / two-dimensional, static, unremarkable.” So
begins the hypnotist speaking to his
origami boat in Wayfare, Pattiann Rogers’s
newest book of poems. Addressing his creation with tenderness (“my darling”), even
as he is about to set his paper boat adrift in
the sea, the hypnotist continues: “But see
how I am folding you now, / carefully,
slowly, this way, that, peering / and pressing. . . . I am turning you / upside down
and back again, creating / depth for you,
its rare hollow and yearning.”
That Rogers can so skillfully entrance
and turn her readers “upside down and
back again” in poem after poem, in book
after book, makes her too a >rst-rate hypnotist, with an aim to make us more conscious
of worlds within and beyond ourselves.
Wayfare is a book of yearning and ful>
ll-ment, of folding and unfolding, of peering
and pressing. Through Rogers’s curiosity,
wit, boundless love of the world, and remarkable dexterity as a poet, we are altered.
Muscular verbs, lush lists, are among
Rogers’s most reliable poetic tools, and
they are appropriate tools as these poems
seek to juxtapose and connect human
forms of creativity with natural cycles of creation and
destruction. Note that Rogers
has apparently taken poetic
liberty and turned the noun
wayfarer into a verb for her
title, perhaps wanting her
readers to be more active, to
have us wayfare.
Wayfare is also an experiment in personae. In these
poems Rogers’s language
joins company with a lover-prostitute, a monk, a painter infatuated
with the color blue, a philosopher of verbs
who declares, “my creator is seek, my wisdom is love,” a blind astronomer who
imagines stars as eyes “giving sight to a
blind universe,” a ?ower garden, the
sound of rain (ting ting), the Eocene. In a
poem central to the collection, Rogers
embodies the voice of a holy spirit contemplating incarnation in such vivid
imagery that we are easily persuaded that
the summer choruses of katydid and
cicada are equal to the sublime music of
Handel’s Messiah.
This book contorts and transforms our
senses. All depths—hers, ours, Earth’s—
are jarred and deepened by its kinetic
contents. The opening
poem, “The Great Deluge
and Its Coming,” is a
powerful foreshadowing
of an apocalyptic ravage
of nature. We are all “
tangled together and carried
/ roughly by the vicious /
waters, thrown about,
bu=eted cruelly / into the
racing surge.” In the
midst of this surge here
is a hypnotic poet speak-
ing and singing; here is Rogers “
slip-ping this candle / and its light into the
heart of your belly.”
—Laurie Kutchins
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