by Patrick James Errington (McGill-Queens University Press / Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, 2023)
Release date: 15 April 2023
Order via the press or pick up from 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)
Advance Praise for the swailing
‘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
‘Patrick Errington is a poet of loss and of the almost-but-never-quite-found. He shows us how, on the crest of emerging form and its dissolution, meaning flares intensely, piercingly.’
Jan Zwicky, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry
‘the swailing is a powerful, unstintingly honest exploration of memory, loss, the subtle play of presence and absence, and the risks to selfhood that longing poses, explored in poems shot through with dark humour, urgency, and exemplary precision.’
John Burnside, author of Black Cat Bone
‘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
‘Gorgeous poems which seem to shimmer on that constantly shifting border between the body and the landscape.”
Andrew McMillan, author of pandemonium
‘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
Reviews & Interviews
‘The swailing is a haunting, dynamic collection, chock-full of surprising imagery and vulnerability, from a wise and measured voice.’
Devki Panchmatia, Outcrop Poetry Issue 2 – read the full review
‘The slow burn of these poems culminates in evocative and expansive lyricism.’
Rebecca Morgan Frank, The Poetry Foundation Review – 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.
Chapbooks/Pamphlets
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