What Want Brings: New & Selected Poems

By Bertha Rogers

"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.'"

--H l ne Cardona
award-winning author of Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves

"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
author of Good Work, winner of 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize

"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
Writer in residence, Walt Whitman Birthplace

"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
author of All Wars Are the Same War
(FutureCycle Press, 2022)and 20 other collections

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1915022770
• ISBN13: 9781915022776
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Salmon Poetry
• Length: 166 Pages