Pattern-book

Jon McGregor writes: ‘In these wonderful, breath-stopping and heart-enlarging poems, Éireann Lorsung asks only that we pay close attention – to the text, to the world, to the way the world becomes note by note the text – while she pays close attention alongside us. These are poems conducted at ground level, at walking pace, attentive to the changing of the light, of the seasons, of the certainties we thought we were growing up with. Here are poems about the American Midwest, the English midlands, the low country of Flanders; about flax, fieldfares, rivers, fathers and brothers, lovers, fabrics, sewing, sowing, grammar, bicycles, umbrellas, rain and snow, fading light, damp houses, tea, gardens, glass jars, distance, language, breath, touch, and the strangeness of metaphor. These are poems to attend to, return to, and share with the community of readers who either already adore Éireann Lorsung’s work or are about to discover it.’ Threaded through with filaments of others’ poems – from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks – Pattern-book’s sonnets, couplets, quatrains and invented forms draw on family life, art history, grief, time and the natural world. Woven of recurring images, Lorsung’s delight in form brings pattern to vivid life.