THE SWAILING

Patrick James Errington

McGill Queen University Press /

Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series

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Patrick James Errington’s debut collection The Swailing is a resonant shaping of what loss means. The collection understand loss as a kind of stasis, wavering from what burns to what freezes, from gaps and absences, to what forms around them. Errington’s poems are sharp renderings of a dynamic natural world, one that has ‘whittled roots into woodwork’, ‘a deer god-split on the snow’. Nature is a shifting setting for Errington, always giving way to expose a latent space for the domestic and the bodily; ‘Snow might come, but not without a break of a body / to collect against’.

In The Swailing, Errington burns a path through each setting: the field, the childhood home, a motel bedroom, to return to the snow which acts as the landscape of a weighty loss. His sophistication lies in the ability to render piercingly precise imagery that never represses its tenderness or intimacy. Grief itself ends up being regenerative, even earns a kind of warmth: ‘each life / accounts for its loss, each word cradles it’s / extinct species.’

Formally, Errington makes us watch out for absences and voids through the burnt-out gaps in his poems. Early on in the collection, his poems tend to fall sparser on the page, and flesh out more towards the end, which reads like another intimacy- as if the collection breaks its silences as it becomes more familiar with us. The collection offers childhood vignettes, concerned with the cruelty and ambiguity of this past. In ‘Call The Wolf A Wolf’, the speaker’s child self is a ‘sparrow in the hawk’ of his father’s body. Time wavers in the poem- the speaker is described as already knowing of and wanting the ‘blood that will, later, billow’ beneath his eye. Errington’s imagery swells with the weight of the corporeal and the natural world: ‘I want his hands, even now, want wind-bent wheat, body antlered light’. The Swailing is a haunting, dynamic collection, chock-full of surprising imagery and vulnerability, from a wise and measured voice

Devki Panchmatia