Éireann Lorsung, Pattern-book

 

BRAMBLE CUTTING

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

pithy centres turn topulp
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 shelterroofs, 

the taste of saltstepping
off a train. An estuary 

in the morning under fog
not to be seen through. 

Bunkers overgrown withthicket.
These last times I was agirl.

Itwas very good to spend a few days with Pattern-book (Manchester UK: Carcanet,2025), the latest full-length collection by American poet (recently returned afterspending a few years living and teaching in Ireland) Éireann Lorsung,especially days prior to hearing her read from the collection [see my notes onour 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— Musicfor 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, PinkTheory! forthcoming with Milkweed Editions in 2026. The poems in Pattern-bookprovide a curious sequence of crisp narratives, each of which begin with aspark, a speck, that broadens as each poem carefully and deliberately unfolds. “Nowclouds pass / the sun, for a moment, and are gone,” she writes at the centre ofthe poem “DESIDERATA,” a poem subtitled with the quotation “reverie alonewill do (Dickenson),” “and everything retains / its gold, and all / we needis 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 apause, a held breath, through quatrains, couplets, sonnets and other form-shapes,and even seem to employ elements of the English-language ghazal, offering leapsof narrative between lines that allow for wider narrative gaps. 

POSTCARD TO SHANA WITHPHOTGRAPH OF
FLORALIËN GHENT, 1913

Everyone I know is losingcities this year. Yesterday
I heard the cuckoo forthe first time, which means 

it’s spring. Since I lastwrote, teams of gardeners
have gone to work allover Ghent, secateurs catching 

light; in days theneighbourhood was transformed.
Gardenias, azaleas. A youngman stood near a shallow 

pool breaking flowersfrom a peach branch and setting
them in water. Industry unrecognizablein its new 

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

trees; apples; plum. The lawnis stippled bright with daffodils.
I thought, if I leavehim I will lose the garden 

I made. I thought, Ican make another garden anytime.
Nevertheless (the lambsare playing now—again!), I stayed.

Throughoutthe collection, Lorsung riffs off lines and poems by such as Emily Dickinson,Gerard Manley Hopkins and Gwendolyn Brooks, John Berryman, Walt Whitman andEdna St Vincent Millay, among others, in her exploration of rhythmic thoughtacross the American Midwest and English Midlands, of the details anddifferences of geographic, cultural and domestic space. As the poem “LINNAEANSYSTEM” begins: “You know the rose is in five pieces. / You know the centre ofthe split apple copies it. / The skin of a nectarine, a pear, an almond, apeach makes my mouth burn.” There is something of Lorsung’s careful precisions,her narrative care that occasionally attempts to shake lose from itself, writinggardens and photographs and paintings and swans, that I find slightlyreminiscent 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 alwaysthere, under the tympanum’s perfect sky. The point // of the painted world isthe blue of our world that lives / and dies. There is no other point but that.”