If one allows for the advances in scientific knowledge since the time of Ralph Waldo Emerson, it is possible, when reading Pattiann Rogers's poetry, to imagine she received her instruction, in complete spiritual compliance, from Emerson himself, so much is his influence apparent in her work. She has taken to heart the transcendentalist concept, as stated in Emerson's "The Poet" (in Essays, Second Series, 1844), that all aspects of the natural world "are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher fact." She would be the poet "whose eye can integrate all the parts," the poet "who reattaches things to nature and to the Whole."

Pattiann Tall Rogers was born on 23 March 1940 in Joplin, Missouri. Her early upbringing was traditional Presbyterian; however, when she was thirteen years old, her parents, William Elmer Tall, an...