Heart Turned Back

Rich in knowledge of forest and farmland, dreamscapes bucolic and nightmarish, Bertha Rogers in her latest book of poems summons up vivid worlds and recollections with clarity and haunting music. She has a painter’s eye for composition and colour, and a naturalist’s keen sense of observation. I am grateful for rampant goldenrod, the spider’s yellow for the evening primrose/ prodigious in its white-veined/ leaves, and the poet’s broken pages of autumn. This is a book that delights and dazzles with its truths, and proves Rogers a poet to be reckoned with. Bertha Rogers’s poems appear in journals and anthologies and in the collections Even the Hemlock: Poems, Illuminations, and Reliquaries (poetry and visual art, Six Swans Artists Editions, NY, 2005); The Fourth Beast (chapbook, Snark Publishing, IL, 2004); A House of Corners (Three Conditions Press, Baltimore, MD, 2000); and Sleeper, You Wake (Mellen Press, NY, 1991).