Splitting and Binding (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

These intense and intelligent poems resist oblivion and void in an infinite process of fulfillment of potentiality. Beginning with death, they evolve into the immortality of transformation. A dead star becomes marsh, a disintegrated sun sings in the rubbings and gratings of the red-legged locust. The mind, ancestor of the sky, contemplates "the nature of itself/ In the motion of stars"; "the mind /Has been obligated from the beginning/ To create an ordered universe/ AS the only possible proof/ OF its own inheritance." Uniting and separating, splitting and binding."Pattiann Rogers see mythic patterns in the changing motions of the universe - "green grain of jelly-seed rotating slowly, / Turning by multiple yellow hairs to place/ Its cold side trapped in a cathedral, transfigured by light of the shinning dove;; a whale aligning "its narrow eye" to "the bright star - point of Polaris." Her poetry is metaphysical and physical, intellectual and sensuous, it has a controlled passion that joins body and spirit - "the soul believes of itself." It finds energy and healing in the dream of life.