Home again, in the found wild! At home with hardness, rocks tilting over landscape’s green edge. To walk with Bertha Rogers is to be at ease in concert halls and art galleries, but even moreso in country barns, ‘warm and deep and full with smell.’ Bertha Rogers’ poems are great creature comfort and revelation combined, a splendid and satisfying admixture, homespun and wise.

Frank Beck, Manhattan Review, has noted, aptly that Rogers’s poems are “daringly and fervently engaged with the natural world—through observation and through active and imaginative participation.”

What Want Brings continues that engagement, producing work that, as critic Don Yorty has noted, “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.”

This is a poet whose concordance with the contradictions and abundances of the natural world is paramount, and quietly convincing. “It is cold out there, where we walk, and November… I spell hawk, speak sky.”

And these are poems for all seasons. Beneath their rustic surface they are in full possession of their faculties, revealing a sophisticated heart and mind. Reading these poems wakes the quiescent and sublime in my hearing, plants wildness in my heart.