“Bertha Rogers’s captivating collection, What Want Brings: New and Selected Poems, is a celebration of love and nature and a testament to her extraordinary life. A meditation on loss, grief and tenderness, as well as a profound tribute to her late husband, it weaves memory and literature with dreams and her heartfelt love of animals in a rich tapestry spanning decades of poetry. At the heart of these deeply moving poems lies a quest to be fully alive, embedded in the alchemy of grace: ‘I wanted to be one, complete— / a manuscript illuminated.’”
—Hélène Cardona
“The richness of Bertha Rogers’s poetry flows from each line, each word, not just on the page to be seen, but heard as we silently mouth the words. Oh, how perfectly musical her voice is, sometimes celebratory, sometimes sad, but always in tune with the matter at hand, whether it be nature or love or loss. ‘Now I trust/in poems, rustling red leaves/I lay carefully on white pages,’ she tells us. Her trust is well placed. What Want Brings brings us a most welcome treasure of poems new and selected.”
—Matthew J. Spireng
“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 more so in country barns, ‘warm and deep and full with smells.’ Bertha Rogers's poems are great creature comfort and revelation combined, a splendid and satisfying admixture, homespun and wise. 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.’ 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.”
—George Wallace
“The first poem in Bertha Rogers's new collection, What Want Brings, suggests what might come next, telling me to go softly and gently into her world of poetry. When she says, ‘…deep listening. . . .I wasn’t the first, last. . . .’, there is a certain rightness to her statements. She even cares for the bully, the Steller’s Jay, writing ‘with duplicate blue streaks pointing out mad eyes/ that flash like a mountain freshet, embodiment of dapper wrath.’ Rogers knows the snow country, strawberry festivals, cedar shakes, ravens, copper beech trees, and life during the pandemic. Her poems reflect the isolated and quiet place where she lives and make me want to visit them again.”
—Martin Willitts Jr
WHAT WANT BRINGS
Gray rain seeps through the fall
of played-out clouds, loops among hills,
ragged mountains; flexes and thins
cut, contoured fields. This here—
nearly parallel to another September
when I, after tramping aged ley lines,
leaned into standing stones that
gently mocked my bent. O! I was in love
with hardness, rocks tilting over
landscape’s green edge, words riven
with meaning! I thought (mindless I)
that I still owned some forever,
and so walked right into those stones,
touched their weighted flanks, shifted
their quiet as if they were my true
grandfathers, good old men who
had only my best in their storied senses;
showed in gray and grizzled faces
deep listening. I wasn’t the first, last—
how many others waited there; forgot
what they were given until,
in some gray-green season those moments,
like gouged-out uplands,
reach, returned—haggard and lonely gift?
ENOUGH
To have held the late August zinnia
by its stiff stalk, watched petals unfold
until its whole romantic show opens
to the watchful bee, his yellow and black fur
sunning, wings whirring and waving.
To have been shocked by the hawk moth’s
bullet body; sleek, unreeling tongue
tracing pink phlox and purple monardia
as the month’s heated breath hovers
above and below scented blossoms.
To watch everyday daisies bloom up
from ground, assume the loose form
of sky-white, changing clouds among
the aster’s wild blue, the silvery altitude.
To walk through the orchard; snap apples
at their stems, share the shine with dusk’s
familiar does and darling fawns;
to call back the long-ago, happy planting day.
It is enough, isn’t it, to have lived—
to have leaned in to the sun-struck zinnia,
the coneflower, shapely bleeding heart;
to inhale them all—and the wren,
singing the shamble, the tangle of summer,
the path to travel when all this is over.
THE DAY
Winter faces smiling from long-grassed ground,
all together, homing, mouths mouthing—
Say, stay, no need to fly on ravens’ wings.
Sudden, that white-speared grin bright-rising.
(She wants brindled pinions, guide-wings,
wants other mysteries, broad-feathered fun.)
Sun’s slant spectral, snow slipping down,
whirling above evening-layered macadam.
Green red yellow blades, Solstice’s haze-change.
Then shadow slides, overtakes all color.
When Thor lets loose his thrice-shaped, black bolt,
autumn’s last silent space, leaning face glows
like a needled compass in a winter woods.
The lost dog dry-noses down—
Do not want to leave, my heart swells.
But those black birds lift, they send her home.
