The Swailing

by Patrick James Errington

Here the long edge / of town Low / winter fog / … My breath / my offering We are / our bodies burning

Firmly rooted in fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness. In these poems human voices whisper through the natural world – a hand turns on a lamp to extinguish the stars; stones outline a sleeping form; a black eye is a storm cloud. Errington stokes vivid images, formal grace, and subtle humour into the flickers of life that hold fast against unforgiving terrain. Here language functions like a controlled burn, one that could at any moment preserve, perfect, or reduce to ash.

Urgent, resonant to the bone, the swailing burns to the ember-edge of grief, memory, and control to find the wildness, wilderness, and wonder that remain.

Genres: Poetry

113 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 15, 2023

Reviews

[Adrienne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good poetry,
but
can we

stop

with



this




type of layout, it's


un




read
able

[Giulia Zzz · Rating 4 out of 5]

“fire-haunted”, “emotional”, “ache” - the descriptions on the book jacket capture this collection well. Dripping with imagery, the poems often require multiple reads to grasp their meanings, sometimes no amount of reads will suffice. The poems are elusive, ghostly almost, yet embodied.

Had the pleasure of attending a reading Dr Errington gave of this collection in Edinburgh in 2023, and was glad to bring home a copy. Read it slowly over several months.

“Like the field behind
your childhood
home, gathering the sky off the windows as you grew.
Leave a door
unlocked, just in case. Leave all the beds unmade, enough
bric-a-brac
to come back for. Stop trimming your longest longings
back”

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

the swailing, the award-winning first full-length poetry collection by Patrick James Errington, features a speaker who “now almost daily” “leave[s] that place in the hope of coming back/ to find it beautiful.” In his dreams of eternal return, he “comes to but never arrives” at the town near Blackfalds, Alberta. More than an abstract meadow, place in the swailing contains the speaker’s memories and visions, who proclaims: “I hold you the way the sky holds rain.” The temporary unity of the sky which holds the rain is like the words which, albeit briefly, connect the lyrical “I” and his addressee, reaching epiphanies that the lyrical I is in fact transformed by his encounters with those around him, and vice versa. That’s why Errington writes, “[s]omeday, you’ll admit you almost always means me.”

Through poetry, the speaker captures that tenuousness and tenderness of the faith of a “devout non-believer” who “kneel[s] / pages closing more careful than hands on a bed.” The oxymoron in “devout nonbelief” characterizes Errington’s phenomenal poetry which is at once sacrosanct and impotent to truly describe how it feels to feel deeply. “[S]mooth and semi-precious,” the poems in the swailing teach us that “a reaching out” might in fact be a “letting go.” Or perhaps the way the rain “pearl[s] the spruce, the timothy ” as the speaker whispers: “but don’t wake. Not just yet.”

This is an introduction to an interview that first appeared in The Los Angeles Review.