On the Poetry Foundation’s website page for Pattiann Rogers, we read that “She is noted for her ability to link the natural and scientific worlds in works filled with sensual imagery, spirituality, and a sense of awe.” And also that her books from 2004 through 2017 “continue to explore theological possibilities as revealed through the natural world.” In a previous post, I followed Rogers through a single poem’s exploring of this revelation. Today, I want to follow this theme in a single volume: Generations (2004).

I’ll start with one of my favorite of Rogers’s poems: “from a simple vanilla vortex come voices of the faithful.” (Yes, that’s correct; Rogers doesn’t capitalize her titles.) Here is the final of the poem’s six stanzas:

Remember, it is into the vortex
of the white orchid of V. planiforia
(from which comes the vanilla bean
and its sensual oils), it is upon the soft
fluted lips of that flower and into the deep
funnel of its elaborate spread that the truly
devout servant must place ears, mouth,
tongue, fingers, so as to receive fully
into the vortex of the soul all messages
of transcendence inherent to that hallowed space.

Typical of Rogers’s poetry is the scientific detail (“the vortex / of the white orchid of V. planiforia / (from which comes the vanilla bean / and its sensual oils)”. Typical, too, is the minute, even luscious, detail of the natural phenomenon she’s focusing on: here, “the soft / fluted lips of that flower” and “the deep / funnel of its elaborate spread.” Into this natural world comes the spiritual vision, in which that “vortex / of the white orchid” is received into “the vortex of the soul,” where the “devout” servant receives “all messages / of transcendence inherent to that hallowed space.” I treasure this verse’s vision; I could even pray with it.

In another poem, “Jacob’s ladder,” “immortality” becomes the key term. The poem opens:

Regard these immortal beings
as one by one they descend
in garments of scarlet tint 
like evening shining on ivory terns
and ice-filled seas.

Through the course of the poem, “these immortal beings” travel through other elements of the natural world—including “rain swaying like human ghosts / gathering across the prairie,” “green drapery like / the birch and the sweet bay,” “deep inside the hoods / of monkshood blossom”—until at the end, they’re

                       clothed like blue
Arctic butterflies in the eternal
form of their own motion. Arrayed
in the phenomena of immortality,
they are made immortal. Regard
these beings from heaven forever
in their earthly descent.

Other religious terms enter the poem titled “and motion in philosophy.” From the poem’s beginning—

We say we move miles across desert
ice and black volcanic sand, down
numbers of leagues into the night
of oceans and caves.

—we move at the end to:

While considering the consecrated
motion of winter moonlight across
a vision of white in the mind, it might
be possible to journey there, to move
at will with the conscious speed of prayer
through such a current of god.

So the “motion of winter moonlight” is “consecrated”; and “the conscious speed of prayer” moves “through such a current of god.” Rogers doesn’t capitalize “god,” though it’s clearly God, who appears in several other poems in this collection.

Take, for example, the poem “a statement of certainty,” where the speakers seem to be birds and other natural creatures:

Here we are, all of us now, some of us
in emerald feathers, in chestnut or purple,
some with bodies of silver, red,
or azure scales, some with faces
of golden fur, some with sea-floating
sails of translucent blue, some pulsing
with fluorescence at dust, some
pulsing inside shell coverings shining
like obsidian…

These creatures continue speaking:

Because many of us have many names—
black-masked or black-footed or blue-
footed, spiny, barbed, whiskered or ringed,
three-toed, nine-banded, four-horned,
whistling or piping, scavenger or prey—
we understand this attribute of god.

What is this attribute of god? The poem doesn’t say. But in another poem, “genus whistler,” god’s activity in nature is clearly specified. First, though, come three stanzas detailing whistling in nature, including

One of the most common whistlers,
found everywhere on earth,
is the wind, whistling with the furl
and strafe of cattail marshes
in autumn…

And

The whistling of the black-bellied
whistling ducks in the tree-top perches
is shrill in its refrains, while the Arctic
tundra actually becomes quite musical
with the whistlings of the whistling
swans in summer…

Then the poem’s final stanza speculates on whether “god” whistles—perhaps in natural objects and creatures:

I don’t know anything about god
whistling, unless god is the wind,
unless god is the black-bellied duck
whistling high in a tree, or the hoary
marmot alarmed, or a boy for fun
blowing on a blade of grass held
between his hands, or a lover calling,
invisible and loved, unless god
is the will to whistle, ancient,
abundant, perfectly expressive
in all its forms, a will that wills to be
every manifestation of its own will.

I could go on and on. But I hope these examples give a good sense of Pattiann Rogers’s vision of spiritual realities alive in the natural world—a world teeming with a mind-boggling plethora of attributes. I don’t know of another poet who does anything like this.

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.