Customer Reviews

Heart Turned Back (Salmon Poetry)

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Bertha Rogers write complex free verse frequently about nature, farming, animals and family. Her poetry, lacking any kind of sound or rhythmic device, relies mostly on image, metaphor and juxtaposition, her best poems leaving the reader enjoying the pictures seen or the language used to describe them. In theme and mood she is something like Robert Frost or Seamus Heaney.

Here's the thing: her poetry is not easy.

No one says it should be; even before the obfuscatory modernists got their hands on it, good poetry was not necessarily easy to understand the first time through. I'm just saying that many things about Rogers' poetry make it difficult, like a tight knot of words that the reader must unpick. Consider these lines:

At sixteen I cut into the worm, I

contemptuously dissected the frog,

laid out on mirrored metal--I saw my face.

Who, you ask, will kill the cat that murders

the bluebird's chick? In that doomed orchard

dying trees forgot how they edged toward

bees, convulsed to fruit. High in the woods,

beneath the hawthorns, the skirted brambles,

deer the color of dying leaves turn and

turn and go to sleep...

It's not that it is incoherent, but it does feel like we are playing cards, and I'm trying to guess Rogers' hand as she lays down one card slowly after the other, her face inscrutable. The meaning lies in the relationship of the images to each other, but like those "magic eye" posters, you have to keep staring until the meaning comes into focus.

Furthermore, Rogers is not bound by typical diction (not that any poet should be, of course). As a result, the reader is faced with phrases like

I beg them back--those gone prodigals; their

sweet hapless speech outvoicing resilience.

Such word choice can induce both insight and head-scratching. My guess is that Rogers' appeal will largely depend on the reader and the reader's mood: read these poems without distraction and hurry, and savor the rich descriptions.

Zach Hudson

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