Poets Bertha Rogers and Mary Gilliland / by Sharon Israel

LISTEN to my August 12th, 2025 WIOX show (also a podcast!) featuring poets Bertha Rogers and Mary Gilliland. Bertha and Mary discuss their new books and talk about their work and their lives in poetry over the last few decades.

Mary Gilliland is the author of Ember Days, The Devil’s Fools (winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award and the CNY Book Award), and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Prize). Honors include the 2023 International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry and a Cornell University Council on the Arts Faculty Grant. Mary is a poet, ecologist, and occasional essayist in New York’s Finger Lakes Region where she has transformed a rocky acre of Six Mile Creek into a fawn-filled woodland garden. https://marygilliland.com/

 

Bertha Rogers is a poet, translator, and visual artist who lives and writes and walks on a mountain in New York’s Catskills. Her recent poetry collection (Salmon, Ireland), is What Want Brings: New & Selected Poems. Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle Poems from the Exeter Book was published in 2019; and her translation of Beowulf  in 2000 (Birch Brook, NY).  Bertha, named First Poet Laureate of Delaware County, New York, in March 2005, and was the founding director of Bright Hill Press and Word Thursdays, a nonprofit organization in New York's Catskill Mountain Region.  www.bertharogers.com.

 Praise for Bertha Rogers and Mary Gilliland

"The richness of Bertha Rogers's poetry flows from each line, each word, not just on thepage to be seen, but heard as we silently mouth the words. Oh, how perfectly musical hervoice 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 laycarefully 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

Mary Gilliland’s In the Pool of the Sea’s Shoulder is a modern classic; an elemental deep-dive into the life of her brother, as Freddy, whose life was tragically cut short. Here, time and memory are distilled by ‘listening into the dark’ in a poetics so sensitively attuned to loss and written through a myriad of forms and voices. Within the elegiac energy, there are echoes of Muriel Rukeyser’s activist commitment in the documentary approach here. Tender yet ludic, this is a work of searing intelligence. Gilliland is a visionary poet writing at her peak.—JAMES BYRNE