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Rogers shines in Sundogs
By Michael Worringer
Library Communications
Posted 7/19/2006
MADISON, Wis.—James Silas Rogers revels in the great outdoors in Sundogs, the fourth Parallel Press poetry chapbook of 2006.
Mother Nature is Rogers’ muse in nearly every poem in Sundogs. The author transports readers to intimate moments spent interacting with the natural world. In “Feeding Geese” Rogers writes, “In steady silent vectors the flock / funnels itself to this swamp-edge dock / as if reeled in, drawn by strings,” while in “Butterfly in August,” Rogers notes, “The Monarch was falling the way / a mantra slips from the mind, / with the grace of resignation.”
Several of Rogers’ poems also touch on themes of life and death, as he often writes of his experiences walking in cemeteries. In “At a Country Graveyard in Washington County,” Rogers writes, “The German farmers here died in their own language. / On headstones, only the years make sense.”
Rogers is managing director of the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas and the editor of the journal New Hibernia Review. He has also been working on a collection of essays involving burial places and sacred spaces. Portions of that work have appeared in New Letters, South Dakota Review, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environments, and elsewhere.
The Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. Sundogs is its 44th poetry chapbook.
Poetry chapbooks may be purchased in groups of six for $50, or $10 each. or more information, visit http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison , WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
The title selection from Sundogs
As I cross the river the radio says it’s fourteen below.
The defroster fan whines. Snow groans beneath car wheels.
The morning puts me in mind of my fifth-grade reader
and a Paul Bunyan tale of lumber camp so cold
that when the loggers spoke, the woods stayed silent except
for the tinkle of frozen words breaking like dropped wineglasses
on the forest floor. I glance toward the bridge
that marks the other bracket of my summer cycling loop:
great still plumes hang above smokestacks, fixed upon
the windless winter sky. They erode like dry ice
into the daylight. I think of the word sundogs,
which is what my father called the parentheses of faint prism
half-enclosing the hazed sun, and how he first heard the term
from a Montana rancher maybe seventy years ago.
Certain words pass hand to hand; knowing its descent,
I hold the word sundogs in my mind, admiring it as I might
admire the heft of a pocket watch held in my palm—
own it, as I can never own the knowledge, part-recalled
from an anthropology text, that a folk belief somewhere
demands a sudden gift whenever you spot a sundog.
No. That’s not my tribe. That’s not my story.
I wish, though, that I could make you a gift of these sundogs,
or at least of the word that embraces them, names them,
gives them a place in our lives. I wish that I could do more
than throw words into the frozen air.