Glint & Swerve

Veronica Patterson's new book opens with the stunning poem, "Seven Swans," and a series of poems with birds in them. The poems create a larger canvas for a wider spectrum of themes: from the natural world to family, community, travel, myth, and literary allusions, in a spiral of openings and closings. The speaker returns to the birds around us as harbingers of joy as she waits "for [her] emptiness to speak." Progressively, the loneliness in the poems warms into a creative solitude, rich with the context of what surrounds her and what she finds in books, all brought to us in a tone both elegant and intimate. Beginning in a season "when everything hurts," the speaker moves in tenderness toward her subjects, building to a quietly emotional finale.

-Mary Crow, Poet Laureate of Colorado

In Glint and Swerve, Veronica Patterson's poetry is exquisitely attentive to language and alive with image. What delights most, however, is the way her poems hold love and loss in balance with wry humor and philosophical reach. Patterson's voice does exactly what the title promises - it pierces with clarity, then swerves into the unexpected.

One of the collection's many marvels, "The Orange in the Open," exemplifies her singular vision: surreal, intimate, and quietly comic. A discarded orange on hot tar becomes metaphysical, having "come to rest / or risen from the vena cava of our longing," and from that small sight, begins to "order our hearts' / hierarchy." The neglected object turns, improbably, redemptive - "we were wildly / civilized by this dimpled Buddha."

Much of the same transformation awaits the reader throughout the book. Patterson's poems wildly civilize one's sense of language, moving expansively but with virtuosic control. She insists that attention itself is a creative and moral act.

-Evan Oakley, Professor Emeritus, Aims Community College