Prizes & Awards
2022 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, Writer’s Trust of Canada (selected by Tenille K. Campbell, Michael Prior, and Suzannah Showler)
If Fire, Then Bird
‘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, and Suzannah Showler
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
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
Wigtown Poetry Competition, 2017 (selected by Ryan Van Winkle)
‘On Highway 2A Near Blackfalds, Alberta, As Night Comes On’ (1st prize)
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
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
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
Anthologies
Best New Poets 2020 (selected by Kaveh Akbar)
‘Not an Elegy’
Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–2021 (selected by Nick Makoha)
‘Burning the Fields’ (print only | order anthology)
Best New Poets 2019 (selected by Cate Marvin)
‘Fieldwork in Secret’ (print only | order anthology)
Best New Poets 2018 (selected by Kyle Dargan)
‘Half Measures’ (print only | order anthology)
Best New Poets 2016 (selected by Mary Szybist)
‘White Lies’ (print only | order anthology)
Journals
Wet Grain
‘Light Revisions’ (print only | order issue)
Berfrois
‘Long Last’
The Fiddlehead
‘Missive’
‘The Point’
‘Calling a Wolf a Wolf’ (print only | order issue)
Poetry International
‘The Opposite of Poetry’
‘Fieldwork in Secret’
‘The Calling’ (print only | order issue)
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)
The 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’
Gitanjali & Beyond
‘Terms of Venery’
‘Ways to Watch the News’
‘Now That I Look Back on It’
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)
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)
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)
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 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)