Éireann Lorsung, Pattern-book

 

BRAMBLE CUTTING

Five-petaled, milk-white—say
thin as milk, as wholesome: 

pithy centres turn to pulp
in July. All year, canes 

overrun garden paths, empty
lots. Bramble is a lesson 

in plant economy.
       —In another life

I could be bramble: or
rain on bush shelter roofs, 

the taste of salt stepping
off a train. An estuary 

in the morning under fog
not to be seen through. 

Bunkers overgrown with thicket.
These last times I was a girl.

It was very good to spend a few days with Pattern-book (Manchester UK: Carcanet, 2025), the latest full-length collection by American poet (recently returned after spending a few years living and teaching in Ireland) Éireann Lorsung, especially days prior to hearing her read from the collection [see my notes on our shared Dublin reading here]. Slated to take over editing of South Dakota Review this fall, Lorsung is the author of three prior full-length collections—Music for Landing Planes By (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2007), Her book: poems (Milkweed, 2013) and The Century (Milkweed, 2020), winner of the Maine Literary Award in Poetry—with a further title, Pink Theory! forthcoming with Milkweed Editions in 2026. The poems in Pattern-book provide a curious sequence of crisp narratives, each of which begin with a spark, a speck, that broadens as each poem carefully and deliberately unfolds. “Now clouds pass / the sun, for a moment, and are gone,” she writes at the centre of the poem “DESIDERATA,” a poem subtitled with the quotation “reverie alone will do (Dickenson),” “and everything retains / its gold, and all / we need is in this / meadow, its / umbels and its star- / shaped yellow heads of ragwort / and, floating off somewhere, / a train’s sound.” Her line-breaks often hold a pause, a held breath, through quatrains, couplets, sonnets and other form-shapes, and even seem to employ elements of the English-language ghazal, offering leaps of narrative between lines that allow for wider narrative gaps. 

POSTCARD TO SHANA WITH PHOTGRAPH OF
FLORALIËN GHENT, 1913

Everyone I know is losing cities this year. Yesterday
I heard the cuckoo for the first time, which means 

it’s spring. Since I last wrote, teams of gardeners
have gone to work all over Ghent, secateurs catching 

light; in days the neighbourhood was transformed.
Gardenias, azaleas. A young man stood near a shallow 

pool breaking flowers from a peach branch and setting
them in water. Industry unrecognizable in its new 

horticultural clothes. You know I have been tending
to an orchard of my own: peach tree and cherry 

trees; apples; plum. The lawn is stippled bright with daffodils.
I thought, if I leave him I will lose the garden 

I made. I thought, I can make another garden anytime.
Nevertheless (the lambs are playing now—again!), I stayed.

Throughout the collection, Lorsung riffs off lines and poems by such as Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Gwendolyn Brooks, John Berryman, Walt Whitman and Edna St Vincent Millay, among others, in her exploration of rhythmic thought across the American Midwest and English Midlands, of the details and differences of geographic, cultural and domestic space. As the poem “LINNAEAN SYSTEM” begins: “You know the rose is in five pieces. / You know the centre of the split apple copies it. / The skin of a nectarine, a pear, an almond, a peach makes my mouth burn.” There is something of Lorsung’s careful precisions, her narrative care that occasionally attempts to shake lose from itself, writing gardens and photographs and paintings and swans, that I find slightly reminiscent of the work of Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster [see my short review of her most recent book here]. “I have a sense of history as if it were a picture:,” she writes, near the end of the poem “FEBRUARY MOTHER,” “here the donkey / struggles uphill under its load of sticks, and here the pigeons // pick at grain. The fire never burns out. No one dies. The world / is always there, under the tympanum’s perfect sky. The point // of the painted world is the blue of our world that lives / and dies. There is no other point but that.”