Pattern-book by Éireann Lorsung PRE-ORDER
Published 29th May 2025. Available for pre-order.
PATTERN-BOOK is a collection of poems about family, grief, time, art—visual art, but also poetry—and about language itself. It's threaded through with filaments of poems by Emily Dickinson, and makes reference to John Berryman, whose suicide haunted my education on the campus where he died, and to Edna St Vincent Millay, whose modernist sonnets were some of my earliest favorite poems and are models for my own. Across the book, I'm thinking about how time passes, how art relates to that passage both in its making and in its capacity to recall and memorialize (however imperfectly). I'm also thinking about the gap between experience and depiction. In poems, we try to get language to do what it can't—to say perfectly what is only perfect in experience. How does language cross that gap? How do I know what I experience, if I only have language to think with? Where does the 'I' who says 'I know' come from? These questions bear on the poems' attention to the places where I learned to think about poetry: schools, universities, friendships, the kitchen table, the garden. Several of the poems were written after the death of my father and a beloved aunt, both of whom imparted their love of poetry to me. These guided me toward thinking of the book as a whole as about the mystery of human life: aging, mortality, love, understanding. Formally, I'm interested in repetition and difference—the title is a clue! Patterns are made of tiny pieces that, over time, can be seen in relation to one another. That's true of family life, of poem-making, of art history, and of gardening, all of which show up in this book.My interest in repetition and difference shows up in recurring forms (sonnets, couplets, prose poems; the alphabet as a formal device) and motifs: family relationships; education; rivers (the Mississippi in Minneapolis; the Leie in Flanders), bridges, roads; seasons; letters (alphabet and epistle); the loop as image and structure. There are images that recur across poems, especially but not only color images. As for book form, there are three sections ('Spelling', 'Drawing', 'Elegies') made up of mostly shorter poems, and one, 'Singing', made of longer poems composed from smaller pieces.
PATTERN-BOOK is a collection of poems about family, grief, time, art—visual art, but also poetry—and about language itself. It's threaded through with filaments of poems by Emily Dickinson, and makes reference to John Berryman, whose suicide haunted my education on the campus where he died, and to Edna St Vincent Millay, whose modernist sonnets were some of my earliest favorite poems and are models for my own. Across the book, I'm thinking about how time passes, how art relates to that passage both in its making and in its capacity to recall and memorialize (however imperfectly). I'm also thinking about the gap between experience and depiction. In poems, we try to get language to do what it can't—to say perfectly what is only perfect in experience. How does language cross that gap? How do I know what I experience, if I only have language to think with? Where does the 'I' who says 'I know' come from? These questions bear on the poems' attention to the places where I learned to think about poetry: schools, universities, friendships, the kitchen table, the garden. Several of the poems were written after the death of my father and a beloved aunt, both of whom imparted their love of poetry to me. These guided me toward thinking of the book as a whole as about the mystery of human life: aging, mortality, love, understanding. Formally, I'm interested in repetition and difference—the title is a clue! Patterns are made of tiny pieces that, over time, can be seen in relation to one another. That's true of family life, of poem-making, of art history, and of gardening, all of which show up in this book.My interest in repetition and difference shows up in recurring forms (sonnets, couplets, prose poems; the alphabet as a formal device) and motifs: family relationships; education; rivers (the Mississippi in Minneapolis; the Leie in Flanders), bridges, roads; seasons; letters (alphabet and epistle); the loop as image and structure. There are images that recur across poems, especially but not only color images. As for book form, there are three sections ('Spelling', 'Drawing', 'Elegies') made up of mostly shorter poems, and one, 'Singing', made of longer poems composed from smaller pieces.
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