Reviews & Critical Writing
‘How can words ever mean enough? Patrick James Errington on Tamar Yoseloff, Rachel Mann and Keiran Goddard’, in Poetry London, no 96, 2020. (print only | buy the issue)
Excerpt: ‘…like for Yoseloff and Mann, the central struggle for faith and hope is twinned with the struggle for language, and for Goddard this seems to be enacted in the distrust of the singular poem as a discrete, meaning-making artifact. Meaning, here, must come in the spaces between, in the task of connecting together, just as hope and faith come only in the struggle for them…’
‘The Long Read: Patrick James Errington on Jericho Brown, Morgan Parker, & Kaveh Akbar’, in The Compass, 2017.
Excerpt: ‘It is fitting that an early poem in Jericho Brown’s collection ends with a warning: “Every last word is contagious.” We’d better believe him. Brown’s lyric has a way of affecting the flesh, the bone, the body of its readers. Each poem is a blow, a caress, a shake, an embrace, an infection; each is a distinctly bodily experience with effects that will linger long after the event. We might put this collection down, walk away, but we’ll continue to feel Brown’s language for days.’