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Patient Frame
Governor General's Literary Award finalist and bestselling author Steven Heighton's considerable dramatic lyric powers reach a new sophistication and intensity in his astonishing collection Patient Frame . From the court of Medici to the My Lai massacre; from love for a daughter and mother, through nightmare and displacement, to moments of painful acceptance; from erotic passion to situations of deep moral failure, these poems are part of an ongoing search, a scanning of our human horizons for moments of lasting value. Heighton's work has long shown a resolve to achieve some viable rapprochement between the mind's cold structures and the earthbound drives of the body. Dynamic, vigorous, tender poems as engaged with the moment as they are with traditions of East and West. Patient Frame brings together more of Heighton's vital translations of poets as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges and Horace.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
1 person is currently reading
14 people want to read
About the author
Steven Heighton
39 books74 followersSteven Heighton (born August 14, 1961) is a Canadian novelist, short story writer and poet. He is the author of ten books, including two short story collections, three novels, and five poetry collections.[1] His most recent novel, Every Lost Country, was published in 2010.
Heighton was born in Toronto, Ontario, and earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degree, at Queens University.[2]
Heighton's most recent books are the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) [3] and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010).[4]
Heighton is also the author of the novel Afterlands (2006),which appeared in six countries.[5] The book has recently been optioned for film. Steven Heighton's debut novel, The Shadow Boxer (2001), a story about a young poet-boxer and his struggles growing up, also appeared in five countries.[6]
His work has been translated into ten languages and widely anthologised.[7] His books have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, the Journey Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award (best book of the year).[8] He has received the Gerald Lampert Award, gold medals for fiction and for poetry in the National Magazine Awards, the Air Canada Award, and the 2002 Petra Kenney Prize. Flight Paths of the Emperor has been listed at Amazon.ca as one of the ten best Canadian short story collections.[9]
Heighton has been the writer-in-residence at McArthur College, Queen's University and The University of Ottawa.[10] He has also participated in several workshops including the Summer Literary Seminars, poetry work shop, in St. Petersburg, Russia (2007), and the Writing with Style, short fiction workshop, in Banff, Alberta (2007).[11]
Heighton currently lives in Kingston, Ontario with his family.[12]
Heighton was born in Toronto, Ontario, and earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degree, at Queens University.[2]
Heighton's most recent books are the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) [3] and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010).[4]
Heighton is also the author of the novel Afterlands (2006),which appeared in six countries.[5] The book has recently been optioned for film. Steven Heighton's debut novel, The Shadow Boxer (2001), a story about a young poet-boxer and his struggles growing up, also appeared in five countries.[6]
His work has been translated into ten languages and widely anthologised.[7] His books have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, the Journey Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award (best book of the year).[8] He has received the Gerald Lampert Award, gold medals for fiction and for poetry in the National Magazine Awards, the Air Canada Award, and the 2002 Petra Kenney Prize. Flight Paths of the Emperor has been listed at Amazon.ca as one of the ten best Canadian short story collections.[9]
Heighton has been the writer-in-residence at McArthur College, Queen's University and The University of Ottawa.[10] He has also participated in several workshops including the Summer Literary Seminars, poetry work shop, in St. Petersburg, Russia (2007), and the Writing with Style, short fiction workshop, in Banff, Alberta (2007).[11]
Heighton currently lives in Kingston, Ontario with his family.[12]
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 26, 2012
Over-achiever that Steven Heighton is, he simultaneously released a brand new novel and a brand new poetry collection. My most recent pleasure is the poetry collection: Patient Frame (House of Anansi 2010).
Heighton’s work is noted for its ambitious range. Living up to Heighton’s reputation, Patient Frame delves into remarkably diverse topics. He quotes Elizabeth Taylor, Dave Bidini, Robert Kroetsch, the Saxon Chronicles, and Martin Amis (find a pattern there, I dare you). He explores the My Lai massacre, parental love, capitalism, natural disaster, Haitian revolution, pedophilia, the court of Medici, adolescence, and a sprawling host of other topics that together cannot be easily classified, generalized, and categorized. If you are a reader who turns to books to take you to new places and stretch your mind in unexpected ways, I’m pretty sure your twenty bucks couldn’t do better than Patient Frame.
For me, the personal domestic poems at the heart of this collection have the most power. “Home Movies 8 mm,” for example, concludes with a poignant reminder that I plan to write in bold across my fridge, my bathroom mirror, my steering wheel, and my computer screen: “If I could start over, I would stare and stare.”
Heighton’s other poems featuring intimate moments in regular day-to-day life move me just as deeply. “The Last Reader,” for example, focuses on a dying mother trying to read her son’s first book as she slowly goes blind: “this plot no lamp can brighten.” Another favourite—“Herself, Revised”—tries to mark the liminal moment at which a daughter grows too old to want bedtime stories read by her father: “How does the end enter? [….] Maybe it doesn’t enter at all./ It was there in every sentence: the end.”
Patient Frame deals with intense human emotion and the impossibility of doing it justice with words: “How can your heart pin down the phrase/ by which it might be grasped? We lose,/ in translation, the words we know./ Say a thing and it turns untrue/ and leaves the deep spring’s face sound-scarred./ Drink from the source. Don’t say a word.”
The marvel of poetry is it keeps trying – trying to speak the unspeakable, trying to describe that which can’t be described, trying to capture that which can’t be captured
Heighton’s work is noted for its ambitious range. Living up to Heighton’s reputation, Patient Frame delves into remarkably diverse topics. He quotes Elizabeth Taylor, Dave Bidini, Robert Kroetsch, the Saxon Chronicles, and Martin Amis (find a pattern there, I dare you). He explores the My Lai massacre, parental love, capitalism, natural disaster, Haitian revolution, pedophilia, the court of Medici, adolescence, and a sprawling host of other topics that together cannot be easily classified, generalized, and categorized. If you are a reader who turns to books to take you to new places and stretch your mind in unexpected ways, I’m pretty sure your twenty bucks couldn’t do better than Patient Frame.
For me, the personal domestic poems at the heart of this collection have the most power. “Home Movies 8 mm,” for example, concludes with a poignant reminder that I plan to write in bold across my fridge, my bathroom mirror, my steering wheel, and my computer screen: “If I could start over, I would stare and stare.”
Heighton’s other poems featuring intimate moments in regular day-to-day life move me just as deeply. “The Last Reader,” for example, focuses on a dying mother trying to read her son’s first book as she slowly goes blind: “this plot no lamp can brighten.” Another favourite—“Herself, Revised”—tries to mark the liminal moment at which a daughter grows too old to want bedtime stories read by her father: “How does the end enter? [….] Maybe it doesn’t enter at all./ It was there in every sentence: the end.”
Patient Frame deals with intense human emotion and the impossibility of doing it justice with words: “How can your heart pin down the phrase/ by which it might be grasped? We lose,/ in translation, the words we know./ Say a thing and it turns untrue/ and leaves the deep spring’s face sound-scarred./ Drink from the source. Don’t say a word.”
The marvel of poetry is it keeps trying – trying to speak the unspeakable, trying to describe that which can’t be described, trying to capture that which can’t be captured
February 4, 2011
I'd seen Heighton read. I liked what I heard and hurried to buy the book he was reading from. Now, having read it, I'm susrprised at the lack of vibrancy in the poetry. I want to say quick, the poems have no quick. Good poems have a fuse sputtering through, twisted together by thought and emotion and rhyme and meter. Energy. I don't find it in Heighton's poems. The best things in the book are the 14 translations at the end. Unmoved until I came to them, now I wonder if it was the translations he'd been reading that night. He has the ability to occasionally surprise me--in one poem he uses the word rudder as a verb, lifting me enough to mark that passage. But aside from the translations the book doesn't make an impression.
January 26, 2022
Years later, sober, or from inside the snub barrel
of a shot glass, you spoke about it softly,
not reticent but baffled, still: how Calley
and his men appeared below you, butchering
the villagers, and down you banked your recon
chopped to light between him and the enemy
women, toddlers, crones. Ordered your door-gunners
to fire on any comrades who'd resume that riot
of infanticide, mob rape - and then, from a midden
of twitching limbs, your crew pried free a gore-smeared child
and bore him beyond harm, as if to save was also labour
for male arms, as if love were the one flag you'd salute.
(Not quite - you were a keen recruit, proudly hailed patriot.)
You're gone now, cancer, my sad captain, while Calley -
a few years' house arrest for four hundred dead - lives
in Atlanta, retired. Don't do something in hope of reward,
you said, it might never come. Just lynch mail, roadkill,
razored strays splayed at your door. Still, in the Agent
Orange skies, your archangelic contrail lingers - you
at the flightstick, bearing the one child. Forget the pen,
forget the sword: the strongest hands hold neither, but they hold.
* * *
"Holiness, with these monsters in close quarters
we're sure to have a brawl." But the new Caesars
lacked some Roman secret - razors
in the stable straw, or a bonus
bout of starvation, glass goads in the anus
or a good squad of trainers
who knew how to crack a good whip.
So this static, comic creche - this flop -
a Peaceable Kingdom with cud-chewing bull, ape
absently wanking, lion asleep, bloodhound's
limbs twitching in some wet dream of a hind's
stotting fetlocks, and the giraffe, free of wounds,
hunched by the fence, its trembling yellow ass
not enough to coax an assault. Pius
cleared his throat. "The Florence heat, I suppose,"
he yawned. "I've seen sportier feats
at a Synod. When's dinner?" Trailing hoots
and loutcalls, the mob drained out at the exits,
the boxseats emptied, the media crews
taxied elsewhere, till finally Cosimo's
bloodpit was a high-shelved archive of human refuse -
handbills, tickets, peanut shells, all set to motion
by a new wind, as if performing for that pen
of blinking inmates, who remained there . . . still remain
in the blinding empirical lens of the sun
and uranium rainfall, centuries on. "At eight.
Expect exotic cuts. And excellent wine."
* * *
"No good to make a mask of forgiving.
I still hate your guts, hate your DNA. You're
coreless, conceited, glutted with callous fun.
You never praised anyone
until others did first. You're your own miscreation,
you're an animate stain.
(Mosquitoes, like vampires, hide from the sun.)
Whoever's stock is stalling you prance in with your kicks,
icepick-heeled, high-chinned in vain
pride of your paltry sinecure, your salon
of pale fawners. Lady, I hate you.
You tried to steal my living.
When you titter, you swell and quiver like aspic.
When you laugh, I hear dregs glugging down a loud drain."
* * *
The woman whose eyesight is fading tries to read
her son's first book. It's long, 300 pages,
of which she can take in a page a night, at best.
When the doctor says she has less than a year
it's not her eyesight he means. As she reads, death
gets on with its own determined work - studying,
mastering the subtle codes, transcribing her
cell by syllable into the dense, vast anthology
of the dead. Death never doubts itself, as her son,
she knows, must do. Death gets it right each time.
She reads till all sense stops rising from the page,
this plot no lamp can brighten. A week's worth left
to be unveiled. In the still-encrypted world
she and her son the last reader and writer.
* * *
1
Her coffin is lowered: lifeboat over a ship's rail.
We look on, a thinning crew.
2
A dream of cemetery, its upper dermis peeled back:
skeletal ranks lying in their ribs, lost
armada on the floor of the sea.
3
The rudder, torn from the boat, is free like the dead
not to steer but be borne.
* * *
In the stations
of a cortical storm, the solo
sea, plying
and replying through perilous
turnstiles in the mind, unmoors,
makes for the skyline, where
new shores are rolled of gold chain
in three strands
by the moonlight
* * *
She must be colour-
blind, to keep singing this way,
final cicada.
* * *
1
The lone doe that lives
among the mountains of pine
where no leaves fall
can know the autumn has come
by her own cry alone.
2
The guardfires that burn
at the imperial gate -
embering all day
and then, at nightfall, flaring -
such is the love that glows in me.
* * *
Night in the all-night
drug mart
where a kneeling
horse
devours
the vinyl tile
and a woman
with curious vernal burns
is being treated
urgently
while the
ghost despairingly
weeps
by the magazines
of a shot glass, you spoke about it softly,
not reticent but baffled, still: how Calley
and his men appeared below you, butchering
the villagers, and down you banked your recon
chopped to light between him and the enemy
women, toddlers, crones. Ordered your door-gunners
to fire on any comrades who'd resume that riot
of infanticide, mob rape - and then, from a midden
of twitching limbs, your crew pried free a gore-smeared child
and bore him beyond harm, as if to save was also labour
for male arms, as if love were the one flag you'd salute.
(Not quite - you were a keen recruit, proudly hailed patriot.)
You're gone now, cancer, my sad captain, while Calley -
a few years' house arrest for four hundred dead - lives
in Atlanta, retired. Don't do something in hope of reward,
you said, it might never come. Just lynch mail, roadkill,
razored strays splayed at your door. Still, in the Agent
Orange skies, your archangelic contrail lingers - you
at the flightstick, bearing the one child. Forget the pen,
forget the sword: the strongest hands hold neither, but they hold.
- Another of the Just: Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, My Lai, 1968, pg. 3
* * *
"Holiness, with these monsters in close quarters
we're sure to have a brawl." But the new Caesars
lacked some Roman secret - razors
in the stable straw, or a bonus
bout of starvation, glass goads in the anus
or a good squad of trainers
who knew how to crack a good whip.
So this static, comic creche - this flop -
a Peaceable Kingdom with cud-chewing bull, ape
absently wanking, lion asleep, bloodhound's
limbs twitching in some wet dream of a hind's
stotting fetlocks, and the giraffe, free of wounds,
hunched by the fence, its trembling yellow ass
not enough to coax an assault. Pius
cleared his throat. "The Florence heat, I suppose,"
he yawned. "I've seen sportier feats
at a Synod. When's dinner?" Trailing hoots
and loutcalls, the mob drained out at the exits,
the boxseats emptied, the media crews
taxied elsewhere, till finally Cosimo's
bloodpit was a high-shelved archive of human refuse -
handbills, tickets, peanut shells, all set to motion
by a new wind, as if performing for that pen
of blinking inmates, who remained there . . . still remain
in the blinding empirical lens of the sun
and uranium rainfall, centuries on. "At eight.
Expect exotic cuts. And excellent wine."
- Selected Monsters, for Barbara Gowdy, pg. 19-20
* * *
"No good to make a mask of forgiving.
I still hate your guts, hate your DNA. You're
coreless, conceited, glutted with callous fun.
You never praised anyone
until others did first. You're your own miscreation,
you're an animate stain.
(Mosquitoes, like vampires, hide from the sun.)
Whoever's stock is stalling you prance in with your kicks,
icepick-heeled, high-chinned in vain
pride of your paltry sinecure, your salon
of pale fawners. Lady, I hate you.
You tried to steal my living.
When you titter, you swell and quiver like aspic.
When you laugh, I hear dregs glugging down a loud drain."
- Found Lately Among the Effects of Catullus, pg. 30
* * *
The woman whose eyesight is fading tries to read
her son's first book. It's long, 300 pages,
of which she can take in a page a night, at best.
When the doctor says she has less than a year
it's not her eyesight he means. As she reads, death
gets on with its own determined work - studying,
mastering the subtle codes, transcribing her
cell by syllable into the dense, vast anthology
of the dead. Death never doubts itself, as her son,
she knows, must do. Death gets it right each time.
She reads till all sense stops rising from the page,
this plot no lamp can brighten. A week's worth left
to be unveiled. In the still-encrypted world
she and her son the last reader and writer.
- The Last Reader, pg. 43
* * *
1
Her coffin is lowered: lifeboat over a ship's rail.
We look on, a thinning crew.
2
A dream of cemetery, its upper dermis peeled back:
skeletal ranks lying in their ribs, lost
armada on the floor of the sea.
3
The rudder, torn from the boat, is free like the dead
not to steer but be borne.
- Sleeping on Water, pg. 51
* * *
In the stations
of a cortical storm, the solo
sea, plying
and replying through perilous
turnstiles in the mind, unmoors,
makes for the skyline, where
new shores are rolled of gold chain
in three strands
by the moonlight
- Dream of Full Waking, pg. 67
* * *
She must be colour-
blind, to keep singing this way,
final cicada.
- Fall Canvas, pg. 75
* * *
1
The lone doe that lives
among the mountains of pine
where no leaves fall
can know the autumn has come
by her own cry alone.
2
The guardfires that burn
at the imperial gate -
embering all day
and then, at nightfall, flaring -
such is the love that glows in me.
- Tankas, approx. Onakatomi no Yoshinobu, pg. 86
* * *
Night in the all-night
drug mart
where a kneeling
horse
devours
the vinyl tile
and a woman
with curious vernal burns
is being treated
urgently
while the
ghost despairingly
weeps
by the magazines
- Life!, after Miltos Sahtoúris, pg. 92
May 30, 2013
Amazing Canadian poet.
January 22, 2012
It is hard for me to rate someone's poetry; it feels like more of a personal insult if I say anything except supportive, positive statements. That being said, I've never had much of a filter. The poems in this collection are uneven, meaning that some are blow-you-away-and/or-draw-you-in fabulously amazing and some are full of cliches, or simply meandering.
I adore "Herself, Revised," "Some Other Just Ones," and "Ballad of the Slow Road".
I adore "Herself, Revised," "Some Other Just Ones," and "Ballad of the Slow Road".
November 11, 2012
Sadly, I was really disappointed by this collection.
I'd read a few individual poems by Heighten a couple of years ago and loved them, but a whole book of them somehow doesn't work for me. These poems just lack energy. They begin to feel monotonous after just a few and, while they have emotional depth, I often found the conveyance or even the sentiment to be tired.
I want to want to give Heighten another chance, but I don't know if I will be.
I'd read a few individual poems by Heighten a couple of years ago and loved them, but a whole book of them somehow doesn't work for me. These poems just lack energy. They begin to feel monotonous after just a few and, while they have emotional depth, I often found the conveyance or even the sentiment to be tired.
I want to want to give Heighten another chance, but I don't know if I will be.
October 14, 2010
A solid collection of poetry. I have to confess that I liked "The Address Book" better - although I don't think it's the poetry's fault. Heighton's other collection just resonated with me more for some reason.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews