Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
Anton Floyd – Review of Angela Patten’s Feeding the Wild Rabbit.
Kelsay Books (November 2024)
• Language: English • Paperback: 88 pages • ISBN: 978-1-63980-662-1
Available at: https://kelsaybooks.com/products/feeding-the-wild-rabbit
To contact the author for interviews, readings, and other events:
carraigbinn@yahoo.com
Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (Gnōthi seauton) inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo in the ancient Greek precinct of Delphi is the best known of the Delphic maxims and has been variously translated as know your limits or know your soul or know thyself. Patten in her newly published collection, Feeding the Wild Rabbit (Kelsay Books, 2024) has acted on that ancient injunction. Patten’s is a rare gift. Her work is rooted in experience, woven from the fabric of her being. And here we have a poet, writing in free verse, intent on the keenest exploration of her self and like Heaney in Personal Helicon who writes to set the darkness echoing, Patten in a dream state glide(s) effortlessly over ice. No fear / of falling, no searching for / safe harbor. Just this flying (from the title poem of the collection, Feeding the Wild Rabbit). Again in Serpentine she states:
…the supple shape of a stream
murmuring by the road side, going somewhere
I have never been.
These lines come from section No. 4 in the opening poem of the collection, The Hidden Life of Words in which Patten sets about the intricacies of language – the tool with which she equips herself to make her explorations possible. The poem, set out in a series of seven sections, prefigures the kind of patterning the reader encounters throughout the book. Her focus is directed at the multiple layering of connotations in words, that is to say that poetry obeys the subjective logic of intuition to exploit the power of suggestion and association. No. 6, in two short stanzas, demonstrates this kind of layering:
Venial: a sin that is slight and pardonable,
committed without full knowledge or full consent.
How one sin clasps the hand of another
as they slide down the sensual slope of pleasure.
How one syllable leapfrogs over the next,
gathering momentum, constructing association
opening linguistic windows to learn new words.
Typically Patten’s imagination leaps from thought to thought, never ending where you would expect it to. This kind of surprise is deeply satisfying as the poem The Writing Process illustrates. It begins with Mornings I lie in bed sipping coffee but ends some 21 lines later with a gobstopper /…winched up into the light. Between start and finish we encounter the poet comparing herself to a multicolored mongrel, off its weekday leash who amongst other things is rooting at the tuberous rhizome / of family relationships… the labyrinthine radicle of memory. We find ourselves in the midst of words such as crosspatch, snoutfair, colossive; An archaic adage – to be moithered. The unexpected comparison of poet to a mongrel unifies the poem and sustains the conceit demonstrating how Patten’s imagination works; how her ear tunes in to her world. The poem finishes by suggesting how words and memories can act like a tug of the choke chain, remembering/ the moment. In this instance the word gobstopper is particularly appropriate as it is a long lasting sweet, typical of mid-century Irish childhoods, and as the name suggests it is a mouthful that can be a choke hazard. Words, too, can carry all these inherent qualities, sweetness and light as well as dangers for the psyche.
The reader will find this process of constructing or shaping of a poem throughout the collection whether the themes are drawn from a life of letters (this is her fifth poetry collection), childhood, journeying, home, family, religion, or nature. Patten can take you further in fifteen or twenty lines than others can in a sheaf of poems. The tricks of language and recollected events cast long shadows and raise questions about being and belonging – of striking out, of identifying as an outsider so as to maintain a sense of personal integrity and the tension that arises from the sometimes necessary compromises involved in being part of a group.
Another of her stylistic tools is well-honed narrative. Her haunting storytelling draws us into her rebellion against the deeply constraining strictures of her Dublin Catholic and working class formation. Hers is an upbringing that might find cathartic expression in her poems but it also becomes a powerful revelation for her reader. In the opening stanza of Tissue Paper, Patten deftly creates a narrative and cultural context:
Father kept his rolls of colored tissue
in the cupboard under the stairs
to wrap the gorgeous flowers he grew-
blue irises, prickly pink roses,
dense chrysanthemums, huge
moonfaced dahlias full of earwigs –
In stanza three we see how with a flick of his wrist / he created graceful cones / to be conferred on smiling aunts / and the churlish nuns at school.
The aunts in the following stanza, praised father’s gallantry / sometimes glancing askance at their husbands / who liked to back a horse or have a drink / instead of working themselves / into a muck sweat in their / rented backyard gardens. The poem segues neatly into the existential questioning of significant elements in a carefully observed childhood The final two stanzas are unequivocal about the child Angela’s critique of the nun’s behaviour:
The nuns accepted flowers on god’s behalf
but could not love them openly.
Never buried their noses in the bouquets
to inhale their heavenly scent, but only
placed them on high altars out of reach
for some cold effigy to savor.
I wondered at the waste of all that toil
and artistry, that beauty that would wither in a week.
but was not old enough to question why
god needed cut flowers in the first place,
or a harem of virgins dressed in black
to sing his praises morning noon and night.
We see in this poem how Patten can vehemently distance herself from the religious rituals of family life and school in an uncompromising language. My Parents Were Always Kneeling ends:
Mother absorbed in prayer
and I absorbed in watching her,
wondering even then at her
unwavering belief which I
steadfastly refused to emulate.
Further examples can be found throughout the collection in poems like Of Saints and Secrets, The Joyful Mysteries, Speaking of Things That Are No Longer in Use, and in Black Babies…bought on the black market / at cut-rate prices from / the Daughters of the Heart of Mary. Even so, Angela the daughter, sister, niece and friend is fiercely loyal. In Idle Hands while she trailed her hands in the soapy water she creates vivid pen-portraits of the women in her immediate family – Aunts Veronica, Nancy, Kathleen; there’s Granny and mother who have long since laid down their needles / …Their hands are still / Rosary beads twined in their tired fingers. She then completes the thought:
I gazed down into the soap bubbles as if
I could see them there in living miniature
like tiny figures waving from snowdomes
of a kitchen shelf. What are my labors
but a kind of posthumous devotion?
It is a fact of irony that this rebellious, profoundly secular love finds expression in a Catholic diction. In the clearsighted poem Shine the poet watches her father / polishing shoes on Sunday mornings.. our glowing brogues lined up / in a row on the red linoleum / like little soldiers of Christ. She notes, too, the angers of the house …If only he had not berated our mother / for the state of our clothes, fumed / while she was putting on her lipstick, / shamed her by racing up the street / to Our Lady of Victories ahead…he might have / earned a more Christlike comparison. Patten adds in a tellingly compelling image:
As if we children cared with our four
pairs of feet encased in their shiny shoes
already pointed away from the past.
The poem concludes in an unexpected way. Patten even now in foreign cities despite her lacking one iota of religious belief has discovered a way of demonstrating her love and appreciation of her parents in terms that they would understand:
I visit churches to light white votive candles,
pay homage to their long hard labor
and remember their romantic souls,
their spit-shone servitude.
And in the intriguingly titled poem In the Adirondacks there Is a Town Called Paradox she is very aware that the only appropriate response to photographs of the horrors of a Polish concentration camp discovered in sepulchral silences of the adult library is to kneel down:
Maybe genuflecting
is all that you can do.
In many poems such as Swallowing the Lexicon, Springtime at Starbucks, Cures for Insomnia, we find elements of Patten’s impulse to break free of the narrow definitions of her sex. In Swinging Boats for instance we see a girl clad in a secondhand frock / going nowhere fast in a swinging boat. This is more explicitly explored in A Fine Romance where she meditates on the dismal life promised by secretarial school:
If only I had known the manual typewriter
as the mouthpiece of poetry, not symbol
of my servitude. That somewhere
in small rooms above the shop or stable
there were women poets facing Royals,
Smith-Coronas, Underwoods, tapping out
their thoughts into words made flesh
that dwelt amongst us.
The very poignant final line speaks laconically of the dead-end prospect of her secretarial training as the infernal clang of the carriage returning home.
Ironically, even when she has escaped the constraints of Dublin and has made a life for herself in the United States, we discover Angela, the outsider. In Out in Left Field at Dodgertown, Florida she takes cover from a sudden downpour with other spectators at a baseball game in a shelter overlooking homeplate where the Aromas of onions, mustard, pickles / mingle with lush smells of the tropics – yet here in archetypal (male) America she writes:
It might be Ellis Island and I
a displaced immigrant hiding behind
my notebook’s paper wall for all
that I can fathom this melodrama
in which everyone seems to know
what to wear, what to eat, what to say on cue
like the songs in a musical I’ve never seen
but all the others know by heart.
The interplay between rejection and acceptance is a thematic constant and at times the experience of both registers is exquisitely intense. Motherhood with its witty use of a gaff from student essay as an epigraph:
Many young mothers suffer from post-mortem depression
interestingly details another aspect of separation, how For a long time, years perhaps, / you are the breast, perfect / center of the universe, the home planet. When:
Then things change. One Sunday
the father dusts off his baseball glove
and all is over for you,
girl who can’t catch a ball
to save your life.
Patten is grounded in the everyday realities of place. It is understandable and natural, therefore, for the outsider to return imaginatively to places and times, to those feelings of belonging, to the Ireland where she grew up and where the bonds of family were forged. For this exploration read the poem Last Time I Saw My Sisters in which she writes:
We were like the Greae
old from birth, who lived
in the white foam
on the waves of the sea
and rejoiced to share
one eye among them.
Her intuition in the flush of memory draws her to make poems that give life to her family relationships. The focus is on isolating moments and places that would have been easily missed or forgotten had she not chosen to memorialize them. Nearly always some small moment of acute perception has much larger implications as in her poem The Pancake Artist. The scene is the family kitchen on Shrove Tuesday; the objects include the big black frying pan, the blue gas burner, the fat that spat and sizzled, a milk jug full of batter, pouring a creamy stream, to form lumps and craters, the colours are brown sienna, khaki, burnt umber, buttermilk; the actors are the famished children home after school who hovered at their mother’s elbow and she the Artist who with one flick of her gifted wrist… landed the pancake like a fish / on your plate and, in marvellous Dublinese, it was all scarfed down! There was No rest for her aching shoulders / until we were all contented sinners, / licking our lips, as full as eggs. The word sinners is the giveaway for me as I imagine the same nuns who appeared in Tissue Paper or the abstemious monks Of Saints and Secrets here waving an admonishing finger at the children alarmed at their overindulgence!
It would be misleading to focus solely on themes related to childhood formation – family and memory – in this collection. There are poems that cast a revealing light on the living world which continues to be a source of inspiration and ecological concern – an example is to be found in Umwelt, a carefully observed poem that celebrates the diversity of tropical wildlife in Rincón:
Three green parrots, then two more
flying over rooftops…
It is a world of abundance and superflux:
Hundreds of yellow mangoes fallen
on the ground…
while Out on the ocean, pelicans dive-bomb / their prey, gulp it down, then settle back / on the water like bad-tempered old men / groussing about the menu. Here is also an animated multicolored world under the sea where fish grazing on the reef’s edge twist and ripple. They flick and riffle.
The poem ends with an implied understanding of responsible stewardship:
our faces behind masks and snorkels
bent over them like angels.
Patten writes with an emotional and intellectual reach. Hers is a passionate reverence for wildlife. There are moments of bittersweet reflection on the possibly irrevocable ravages of the natural world by time and climate change. A poem that sounds a explicit warning is Green Up Day at the Superfund Site which describes a poisoned land. It shows how Someone found…A robin’ nest with a hole in the bottom, / bobbing on a sea of soda bottles. In similar vein, the poem Domestic Science offers a marvellous nature lesson showing how amongst the hyacinths, clematis, brilliant goldfinches, forsythia, flowers and butterflies, animals will exploit the built environment to build homes of their own, will continue to procreate despite the dull rumble / of a stumpgrinder at work; a mouse will make a home from scaps of insulation. The human response is suitably sensitive:
We had to halt construction
on a new garage because a Phoebe
made her nest on the light fixture
in the half-constructed ceiling.
Our carpenter downed tools,
refused to continue until
all the chicks were fledged.
That love of the outdoors is one Patten shares with her reader in the calm yet faceted language of Lingering Over It. I enjoy the authority of her voice informed by a lifetime of practised observation. In it she describes and appreciates the effects in November of the surprise largesse of the sun on the natural world such as the whirling butterfly bush that refuses / to die back, intent on splaying / its delicate white flowers. We realise that with the geese honking their confusion, no action on earth is without its rippling implications:
Isn’t it supposed to be winter?
How to find our cue to flee the coming cold
in all this blinkered kindness.
Why I Would Like to Be a River is the final poem in the collection and I read it as emblematic of Patten herself as a woman poet or an allegorical summation of her (writing) life. The river begins as a whisper… unnoticed, then first as a slender girl /…a river swells with rainfall. It can by turns shrink, slacken or strengthen to a torrent. The surface is full of natural interest and fecundity – skimming reed buntings, an emerald dragonfly, a kingfisher. Its voice is never a jabber, only song. Despite being impressionable, / foolish, easily led it will in the end / come round to its intended course. Like the independent spirit of Angela herself:
It cannot be contained by fences,
ditches, levees, dams. Leaves
everything it has ever owned
behind it in the past.
The poet’s detachment is key. In the final lines we find a clarity of statement that serves as a mask for much deeper moral understanding:
It runs its own way home, holding
a kiss in its watery mouth.
It is a remarkably confident way to conclude a collection of poems: it conveys an understanding of how the past influences the present yet in the acknowledgement of her seminal experiences Patten’s focus shifts to a guilt-free embrace of the now and the liberating vistas of the ocean.
What Jane Hirshfield says of a poem I believe can apply to this collection as a whole:
A good poem shocks us awake, one way or another – through its beauty, its insight, its music, it shakes or seduces the reader out of the common gaze and into a genuine looking …make no mistake I consider such a moment
of transformation to be a radical event.
Angela Patten’s own words from the poem Making Strange could work, too, to describe Feeding the Wild Rabbit – there’s nothing strange in it absolutely nothing and everything. I would simply add that it lands in its entirety and repays repeated readings.
© Anton Floyd
Anton Floyd was born in Cairo, Egypt, a Levantine mix of Irish, Maltese, English and French Lebanese. Raised in Cyprus, he lived through the struggle for independence and the island remains close to his heart. Educated in Ireland, he studied English at Trinity College, Dublin and University College Cork. He has lived and worked in the Eastern Mediterranean. Now retired from teaching, he lives in West Cork. Poems published and forthcoming in Ireland and elsewhere. Poetry films selected for the Cadence Poetry Film Festival (Seattle, 2023) and the Bloomsday Film Festival (James Joyce Centre, 2023), another, Woman Life Freedom, dedicated to the women of Iran, was commissioned by IUAES. Several times prize-winner of the Irish Haiku Society International Competitions; runner-up in Snapshot Press Haiku Calendar Competition. Awarded the DS Arts Foundation Prize for Poetry (Scotland 2019). Poetry collections, Falling into Place (Revival Press, 2018) and Depositions (Doire Press, 2022); a special, illustrated edition of Depositions translated into Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, and Scots with an introduction by Professor Emeritus Seosamh Watson (Gloír, 2024). New collections On the Edge of Invisibility and Singed to Blue are in preparation. Newly appointed UNESCO – RILA affiliate artist at the University of Glasgow. He is an Associate at the Centre for Poetry Innovation at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.
Angela Patten’s publications include five poetry collections, Feeding the Wild Rabbit (Kelsay Books 2024), The Oriole & the Ovenbird (Kelsay Books 2021), In Praise of Usefulness (Wind Ridge Books 2014), Reliquaries (Salmon Poetry, Ireland 2007) and Still Listening (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 1999), and a prose memoir, High Tea at a Low Table: Stories From An Irish Childhood (Wind Ridge Books 2013). Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. Born and raised in Dublin, she maintains dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States, where she has lived since 1977. She is a Senior Lecturer Emerita in the English Department at the University of Vermont.