Collections/Chapbooks
by Patrick James Errington (McGill-Queens University Press / Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, 2023)
Release date: 15 April 2023
Order from the press, or your local independent bookshop.
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.
Awards
Scottish Poetry Book of the Year (Saltire Society) – Finalist
‘Never have I been nearly moved to tears before by a poem, until I laid eyes on Patrick James Errington’s The Swailing. The ideas and feelings explored in this collection stayed with me long after finishing the final page…’
Ellen Niven, Poetry Shadow Panel Judge
John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize (Trinity College Dublin, Oscar Wilde Centre) – Winner
‘You fall through the zig-zagging synapses of the work, the spiralling fractals. You fall past Canadian skies full of an unspeakable history of snow, the ice fields of family and illness, past Einstein and the Tao, promises kept and broken, cancer, the forensics of the self. [the swailing] is work of remarkable virtuosity which always grounds itself in emotion, in the hard-earned poetics of the heart.’
Professor Eoin McNamee, Chair of the 2024 Judging Panel (Vona Groarke, Alice Lyons, Tom Walker)
Reviews
‘Radiant in its ache and teeming with beauty, the swailing absorbs the haunted geographies of home, forest, field, fire, and snow while delivering a stunning introspection through poems steeped in the winter of their own grief. So many of the last lines blew me away, and I found myself continually returning to savour their longing.’
Mai Der Vang, author of Afterland and Yellow Rain
‘Among the many virtues of Patrick Errington’s impeccably constructed debut is its nearly forensic attention to the minutest particulars: ‘Last night’s rain is pearling the spruce, the timothy.’ What is most astonishing about this exactitude is that rather than dispelling the mystery of being in the world, it fills the reader with renewed marvelling and reverence.’
Timothy Donnelly, author of The Problem of the Many
‘From the beginning of the book to the end, the poet sets the reader’s mind on fire with the luminous language, lyric intensity, and emotional heat of these poems. Patrick Errington’s gorgeous, superbly crafted gems each shimmer under the poet’s fierce gaze, and taken together achieve something grand and powerful.’
Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House
‘The slow burn of these poems culminates in evocative and expansive lyricism.’
Rebecca Morgan Frank, The Poetry Foundation Review – read the full review
‘The Swailing is a haunting, dynamic collection, chock-full of surprising imagery and vulnerability, from a wise and measured voice.’
Devki Panchmatia, Outcrop Poetry – read the full review.
‘ In this sense, Errington’s motif is an ars poetica, swailing as writing what must be written as habit, season, and ritual, ‘fire to manage fire.’ If it must be written by someone from somewhere, the swailing suggests, it equally writes someone and somewhere into being and communion.’
Matthew Salyer, Forbes Magazine – read the full piece.
‘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.”’
Tiffany Troy, LA Review – read the full interview and review.
FIELD STUDIES
(Clutag Five Poems Series)
by Patrick James Errington
(Oxford: Clutag Press, 2019).
Patrick James Errington combines a remarkable intellectual rigour and old-fashioned lyric skill to produce powerfully convincing and memorable poems. But his work is also, straightforwardly, something new: each poem has found an unexpected angle of approach to its subject, and each line refuses any kind of received language, as if it was mounting its own little ‘war against cliché’. We learn to read these poems expecting to be surprised – and we’re rarely disappointed.
Don Paterson
GLEAN
by Patrick James Errington
(Oxford: ignitionpress, 2018).
No doubt about it – not only is Patrick James Errington a real find, the scope of his imagination, combined with psychological integrity and linguistic rigour, mark him out as a poet I’ll return to again and again. He has the strength of will to put the poem first: no stock effects, just a highly tuned poetic mind interrogating the world for the mystery, the roots of pain and the wonder.
John Burnside, advance praise for Glean
Patrick James Errington’s Glean […] demonstrates a quiet poise. There’s something painterly and measured about his work…
Declan Ryan, The Times Literary Supplement
…from the start of the first poem, I am won.
Charlotte McGann, Sphinx review of Glean
Forthcoming Poems
Journals | Anthologies | Prizes
Berfrois
‘Long Last’
2022 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry (selected by Tenille K. Campbell, Michael Prior, & Suzannah Showler)
If Fire, then Bird (a 10-poem sequence)
‘Patrick James Errington’s ‘If Fire, Then Bird’ confronts embered landscapes of memory and loss in sonorous, sensory-rich language. These poems move with undeniable grace and attention, subtly adopting and subverting lyrical and pastoral tropes to pose tough questions about the fragile boundaries between health and illness, presence and absence, place and displacement. Like figures walking through the smoke from a burning field, Errington’s poems emerge with remarkable definition, clarity, and surprise.’
– Tenille K. Campbell, Michael Prior, & Suzannah Showler
Best New Poets 2020 (selected by Kaveh Akbar)
‘Not an Elegy’
2020 Poetry International Prize (selected by Blas Falconer)
‘The Opposite of Poetry’
‘Reading through the poems on the longlist, I kept returning to “The Opposite of Poetry,” a poem rich with irony. This meditation on grief considers how we carry our suffering alone: a broken cup, “still a cup/ despite everything.” I was particularly taken with the poem’s control of the line, which seemed to magnify the moment when the one who is grieving remains composed even as she is breaking.’
– Blas Falconer
Poetry International
‘The Calling’
Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–2021 (selected by Nick Makoha)
‘Burning the Fields’ (print only | order anthology)
Sepia Journal
‘Self Portrait with You and Elk’
Harvard Review
‘Ars Poetica, without Child or Song’
Narrative
‘For a Liberation of Bees’ (‘Poem of the Week’, February 2021)
Poetry Review
‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ (print only | order issue).
Narrative
‘Not an Elegy’
The Night Heron Barks
‘Tower’
The Rialto
‘The Point’ (print only | order issue)
wildness
‘After All This Small Talk, You’d Think There’d Be No Weather Left’
Best New Poets 2019 (selected by Cate Marvin)
‘Fieldwork in Secret’ (print only | order anthology)
Gitanjali & Beyond
‘Terms of Venery’
‘Ways to Watch the News’
‘Now That I Look Back on It’
Best New Poets 2018 (selected by Kyle Dargan)
‘Half Measures’ (print only | order anthology)
The Dark Horse
‘Practice Makes Perfect’ (print only | order issue)
Punctum (a journal of contemporary Latvian literature and philosophy)
‘Bērnībai ziemā’ (‘To a Boyhood in Winter’, translated by Elvīra Bloma)
‘Rituāla noslēpums’ (‘Fieldwork in Secret’, translated by Ausma Perons)
‘Neraugoties uz visu, dzejolis’ (‘Poem, Despite Everything’, translated by Lauris Veips)
‘Rediģēt, ja rodas nepieciešamība’ (‘To Be Redacted Should It Become Necessary’, translated by Raimonds Ķirķis)
Poets.org (Academy of American Poets)
‘Half Measures’
CV2
‘Lessons in River Reading, 1997’ (print only | order issue)
‘Line of Best Fit’ (print only | order issue)
The Cincinnati Review
‘Half Measures’ (print only | order issue)
The Plough International Prize, 2017 (selected by Michael Simmons Roberts)
‘Fieldwork in Secret’ (2nd prize)
‘A finely-judged portrait of childhood and family, built on a striking central metaphor of fences built for ‘just the plain act of keeping’, with its echoes of Heaney and Frost.’
– Michael Simmons Roberts
Passages North
‘Zombies Between Here and the Front Door’ (print only | order issue)
Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, ‘Weekly Poem’
‘Still Life with Approaching Crow’
Boston Review
‘To Be Redacted Should It Become Necessary’
‘Imaginaria’
Copper Nickel
‘Gleaning’ (print only | order issue)
Wigtown Poetry Competition, 2017 (selected by Ryan Van Winkle)
‘On Highway 2A Near Blackfalds, Alberta, As Night Comes On’ (1st prize)
Oxford Poetry
‘Poem, Despite Everything’ (print only | order issue)
Long Poem Magazine
‘In the Dark, She Makes Herself of Abandoned Colour’ (print only | order issue)
The London Magazine
‘There Are Times, I Think, If I Really Had to, I Could Breathe Water’ (print only)
The National Poetry Competition, 2016 (selected by Moniza Alvi, Gerry Cambridge, & Jack Underwood)
‘Never Say Never Say Never’ (commended)
‘[The poem] wants the provisional and the continually repeated, the coming back, as well as the leaving, as a new permanence.’
– Gerry Cambridge
Best New Poets 2016 (selected by Mary Szybist)
‘White Lies’ (print only | order anthology)
The London Magazine Poetry Competition, 2016 (judged by Rebecca Perry & Andrew McMillan)
‘They Don’t Make Gods for Non-Believers’ (1st prize)
‘…right up to the final, shattering line, we are completely held. In reading this poem, we too are exposed to the ‘too white light’ – forced to confront our relationship to illness, health, belief, death, what we rely on.’
– Rebecca Perry & Andrew McMillan
Horsethief
‘I Was a Dream My Body Had’
‘To a Boyhood in Winter’
The Iowa Review
‘This as Something More’ (print only | order issue)
West Branch
‘Leaving Alexandria’ (print only)
‘Little Lit’ (print only)
‘Yew: Directive’ (print only)
‘Burning the Fields’ (print only)
The Flambard International Poetry Prize, 2015 (judged by Jacob Polley)
Four Poems (second prize | print only | watch the reading here)
‘Knotty, challenging, epigrammatic […these are] poems of such startling originality.’
– Jacob Polley
The Adroit Journal
‘Cold, Exchange’
‘Low Tide at the End of the Peffer Burn’
Cider Press Review
‘As White Lies’
Diagram
‘Taxidermy in Burning House’
The American Literary Review
‘Theorette of Relativity’
Punchnel’s
‘River, Comprehending’
Sugared Water
‘Kwashiorkor’ (print only)