The poems in Wild, Again look at humans and other living things who share our planet—the ones who choose to show, even flaunt themselves and the ones who bide—almost, but not quite seen—in shadow or disorder. Like the 19th century American naturalist John Burroughs, Rogers believes that one must exercise “sharp eyes,” observing closely, taking all the time needed to translate that which is seen into words and understanding. The poems in this collection, written over a period of several years, study the territories of fur, flesh, bark, landscape, and sky in order to celebrate the wild without and within.
‘Today I said yes to the land,’ says Bertha Rogers in her passionately wise and visionary new collection Wild, Again. . . . Rogers affirms and celebrates life in its cloaks of glory and gloom The brave poems leap from the page, resonating with an insistence on a life lived with sight and vision, and a bone-deep honesty
—Richard Levine
author of Contiguous States, A Tide of a Hundred Mountains
Wild, Again’s first poem opens with these words: ‘Once I was part of a holy beast. . .’—and the thrilling audacity of that assertion, the claim of having both a divine and inhuman heritage, opens wide the parameters of what a poetic bestiary might be.These aren’t personae poems, these are poems of embodiment.
—Lynn McGee
author of Bonanza, Heirloom Bulldog, Sober Cooking, and Tracks
In Bertha Rogers’s Wild, Again, the poems are wild, or I should say were, because the poet has tamed them just enough to put them on the page where they stay long enough for us to read them, although they want more than anything to get up and walk or fly away, and be about their business.
—Don Yorty, poet
In this generous collection, Bertha Rogers expresses her passion for words and the wild, her animist and transcendentalist beliefs undergirded by her durable poetical craft. As you close this book, you’ll feel grateful to Rogers for having shared her searing love for nature, family, and her late husband.
—George Held
author of Culling and Dog Hill Poems