So it sounds as if all four commenters on this post so far have serious intentions of reading the book. Damn. I should do literary appreciations more often!

I really like the way you reflect on what you see as differences between your poetry and this poem — her “intramural” figurative language, her pass on the Browning-like situational irony.

To answer your question: it is marvelous. I just bought a copy of the book on Biblio for $3.50 delivered. Thanks.

whiskey – Thanks for taking the time to transcribe all of that. Great poem, and it’s something I think about often, actually.

Maybe that’s one of the main reasons to read poetry, I’m thinking: for the reminder that there are other weirdos who think about stuff like this. And come to think of it, that’s pretty similar to the reason why I read blogs.

I am particularly enamored with her supernatural/natural imagery.

Achieving Perspective
Straight up away from this road,
Away from the fitted particles of frost
Coating the hull of each chick pea,
And the stiff archer bug making its way
In the morning dark, toe hair by toe hair,
Up the stem of the trillium,
Straight up through the sky above this road right now,
The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster
Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm
Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes.
I try to remember that.

And even in the gold and purple pretense
Of evening, I make myself remember
That it would take 40,000 years full of gathering
Into leaf and dropping, full of pulp splitting
And the hard wrinkling of seed, of the rising up
Of wood fibers and the disintegration of forests,
Of this lake disappearing completely in the bodies
Of toad slush and duckweed rock,
40,000 years and the fastest thing we own,
To reach the one star nearest to us.

And when you speak to me like this,
I try to remember that the wood and cement walls
Of this room are being swept away now,
Molecule by molecule, in a slow and steady wind,
And nothing at all separates our bodies
From the vast emptiness expanding, and I know
We are sitting in our chairs
Discoursing in the middle of the blackness of space.
And when you look at me
I try to recall that at this moment
Somewhere millions of miles beyond the dimness
Of the sun, the comet Biela, speeding
In its rocks and ices, is just beginning to enter
The widest arc of its elliptical turn.
– Pattiann Rogers

Thanks for introducing me to Rogers (and many other poets, over the years!)