Poems

The vividness of Rodgers’ work was projected partly as an assault on religious narrowness and cultural restriction. His most characteristic poems explore Christian themes, or express an open-faced and big-hearted randiness, or both. At moments of great intensity religious and sexual experiences seem for this poet to have been one and the same. The reader is struck by the tumble of words and images, the puns, the risky deployment of colloquialism and cliché, the rich, idiosyncratic vocabulary.

W R Rodgers is a latterday metaphysical who apprehends the divine through the senses, The Word through words. Indeed, in his finest work we find ‘The Word made flesh, melted into motion’. — from the introduction by Michael Longley