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The Grand Array
The Grand Array is a stunning collection of 18 essays by widely published and highly acclaimed poet Pattiann Rogers. Written over a span of 25 years, these essays show Rogers daringly yet delicately laying out her vision of the essential unity and interdependence of science, spirituality, the arts, and the sensual experience of the physical world. Composed in an anecdotal and lyrical — but never dogmatic — style, The Grand Array takes us on a journey that both celebrates human existence and questions many of our basic concepts about nature, god, and the importance of faith. Regard for the awe-inspiring but sometimes raw mysteries of nature underlies Roger’s writing. At its heart, her message is celebratory und unifying — and as such it’s particularly relevant in today’s fractured world. Rogers calls on us to understand and move beyond the limitations of our knowledge in order to embrace the vastness of the cosmos and the place of humans in its "grand array."
240 pages, Hardcover
First published July 29, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 6, 2017
The collection was broken into four parts, the first three were original essays, while the final was transcripts of interviews with the author. I was drawn to this book by the high praise of other authors I enjoy, namely Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard. While I enjoyed the writing style, there was little that stood out overall.
January 8, 2016
It's encouraging that the first book I read in this new year is one so pleasing, so impressive in its towering intelligence. I've known Pattiann Rogers for many years through her poetry, and my fondness for that led me to these essays.
As in her poetry, the aim of her essays is to demonstrate the universal in the particular. Star dust in the oak leaf has been a theme of many before her. Thomas Wolfe and T. S. Eliot come to mind. I can remember their work expressing the same unity of all existence, but it's my opinion she writes the theme with equal insight and majesty. Her prose makes clear what her poetry veils with metaphor and the figurative. Writing about the family or the death of a small lizard, it's always in relation to the greater universe.
As you might expect, she's equally comfortable writing about the wren as the Andromeda galaxy. In the unity of life on earth and its relation to the physical cosmos as we know it, in all existence in relation to itself in combination and function, she sees divinity. She wants to believe in God but not the omnipotent being and creator. Creation, she says, is an ongoing process and one in which humans play a crucial role. In one of these essays she spends considerable time discussing how human perceptions and acknowledgement give meaning to everything and how important this is because we may be the only cognitive intelligence in the universe. How she joins the spiritual with the physical world of science is dignified, unapologetic, and permissible. She recognizes the divine, sees a holiness that only comes into existence as a poem witnesses it. At one point she commented that her poems are prayers. In a sense poetry can be seen as religious experience.
The book concludes with 3 interviews in which she expands on all this and talks about her need to join poetry with science, specifically to show that poetry can be seen in science which, after all, reveals the development of life and man.
I was impressed with the deep wisdom held within these essays.
As in her poetry, the aim of her essays is to demonstrate the universal in the particular. Star dust in the oak leaf has been a theme of many before her. Thomas Wolfe and T. S. Eliot come to mind. I can remember their work expressing the same unity of all existence, but it's my opinion she writes the theme with equal insight and majesty. Her prose makes clear what her poetry veils with metaphor and the figurative. Writing about the family or the death of a small lizard, it's always in relation to the greater universe.
As you might expect, she's equally comfortable writing about the wren as the Andromeda galaxy. In the unity of life on earth and its relation to the physical cosmos as we know it, in all existence in relation to itself in combination and function, she sees divinity. She wants to believe in God but not the omnipotent being and creator. Creation, she says, is an ongoing process and one in which humans play a crucial role. In one of these essays she spends considerable time discussing how human perceptions and acknowledgement give meaning to everything and how important this is because we may be the only cognitive intelligence in the universe. How she joins the spiritual with the physical world of science is dignified, unapologetic, and permissible. She recognizes the divine, sees a holiness that only comes into existence as a poem witnesses it. At one point she commented that her poems are prayers. In a sense poetry can be seen as religious experience.
The book concludes with 3 interviews in which she expands on all this and talks about her need to join poetry with science, specifically to show that poetry can be seen in science which, after all, reveals the development of life and man.
I was impressed with the deep wisdom held within these essays.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews