review of Pattern-Book. Éireann Lorsung. Carcanet Press.
Pattern-Book is a book of degrees—of angles of vision, of shifts in weather, of change in increments. Near its end, Éireann Lorsung writes,
—I know things change,
that pattern is our life. Things come, things pass.
The difference in days is more a hinge
than the black/white departure it can seem it is.
Stopping for death? In fact, the world goes on.
But in its steady shifting it consoles:
the days that pass also return what’s gone.
Beneath the thinning ice, the river flows.
Winter recedes. Spring comes. That’s all we know:
this world holds us, will not let us go.
This poem, “Sonnet in Early Spring,” distills so much of the collection in which it appears. It employs the overt frames of season and sonnet. It features a sidelong cameo from Dickinson (479, “Because I could not stop for Death”), and Lorsung, here and elsewhere, treats Dickinson as she does many of her forebears, riffing on the standards they’ve passed down, stretching the forms they’ve taught her.
So in her sonnet, the rhymes scheme: some are so slant as to be almost ramshackle (“change” and “hinge,” “goes on” and “gone”). At the same time, “change” and “hinge” make a neat semantic pair, as do “goes on” and “gone.” Then there’s the near-chiasmus: the poem’s last stanza revisits the lines “I know things change, / that pattern is our life. Things come, things pass,” but arranges the repeated verbs in the opposite order. So, in “the days that pass,” we hear the echo of “things pass.” Next, the “spring [that] comes” has to harken back a little further to “things come.” And finally, the assertion “that’s all we know” reaches up to the early line “I know things change.”
So, too, time and tense pivot in this stanza, moving from “goes on” to “gone” and back to “go.” That final “go,” moreover, opposes the stanza’s first word—“stopping”—but, on reflection, also affirms it, because the whole of the verb phrase reads “will not let us go.” Consequently, the stillness the world imposes on us, its “not let[ting] us go,” vibrates; to be held by the world, the poet suggests, is a paradoxical experience, a “steady shifting.”
There are, of course, terser versions of this paradox, the pithiest of which might be Heraclitus’s “Change is the only constant.” But Lorsung isn’t formulating a philosophical truth. She’s after what it feels like to move, over and over again, through a pattern of demise and survival. She’s trying to enact recurrence–both the recurrence of what “Sonnet for October to March” calls
the common miracle: life after death—
advancing spring, the out
and in of breath
and the recurrence of death after life: annihilation. For if these two poems give life, the “in of breath,” the last word—well, in Pattern-Book, even last words remain provisional.
In fact, when Lorsung disentangles herself from the patterns she records, she bows out of them like a mathematician bows out of transcribing a repeating decimal. That is, for the mathematician, 8.333 is close enough to a conclusive solution; a further .0003 won’t add much refinement to the number’s value. But it is also sufficiently clear that the numeral 3 will go on repeating whether he transcribes it or not. Likewise, the poet truncates her conclusions: plants keep reviving, dying and reviving; collectively, we keep breathing out and in and out and in and out. All of which is an answer that’s clear enough without further elaboration. But the “and so on” is also implied, an ellipsis written in invisible ink.
And, yes, “pattern is our life.” Lorsung insists, however, that pattern is not uniform in the living of it. Consider her much longer poem “Autumn Song.” In it, the lines are of more variable length than in most of this collection, sometimes exceeding the breadth of the page and sliding into a second row of text, and the repetition built into this poem is no less varied.
To begin, “Autumn Song” inventories the rudiments of a landscape: hedgerows, rivers, fieldfare, frost, swallows, chamomile, holes, loops, tractors, thrushes, amber, brambles. As well as the rudiments of “daily work”: “shopping and cooking and driving and bickering.” “Some repetition is seemly,” says the speaker of the poem. And it is seemly—even lovely—when the tractor and river come back into view or when the swallows turn up again. Yet the speaker doesn’t simply just recycle these elements of the poem’s world; rather, the river and tractor and swallows get out of their places in line and rearrange themselves each time they cross Lorsung’s field of vision.
Reading this poem, then, feels very much like moving through the world as each of us do, subject to small variations (how high the river happens to be, where the farmer has quit mowing, which bird announces itself first or loudest). And if, for you, the poem would contain different particulars—how many kids are playing soccer in the park and where the cars are parked and the order in which the songs play—the experience of the days’ imperfect repetitions is common to all of us.
What is uncommon is Lorsung’s knack of making such patterns sing rather than drone. In “Broken Blue and White Handled Mug, Maker Unidentified,” she hangs song on time’s arrow: “In the foreground on broken ceramic, life / continues.” And she goes on, describing a bucolic scene and the predictable roses circling the rim of the cup. As in other poems, though, she lets mortality transfigure the ordinary, writing “Under clay in marked / or unmarked plots lie hands that guided roses / around the edge of ordinary cups.” And mortality does its work, giving the ordinary its due, reminding us to cherish daily life, its mugs and anonymous makers, if for no other reason than that we’ll run out of days.
To be clear, though, it’s not only the hovering of mortality that illuminates the ordinary objects and moments in Pattern-Book. Attention is also a force of transfiguration: the artist’s, the poet’s, the second-language speaker’s. As is love, partly because love attenuates time. And partly because love is a force of magnification, it makes the domestic epic, and it makes childhood a kingdom, where what we want is what we already have:
Our father had a bristly beard.
Our mother helped us set the table
while he played the guitar. They were always
singing us to sleep, sewing machine humming
in the next room, and we could believe,
without having to believe, in what dew on grass
and frost on grass in the morning say: again. Again.
The sugar maple giving itself to the fire.
The midnight picnics of Ritz crackers and raisins.
Our father loving our mother all the livelong day.
In “The Kingdom of Childhood,” love that saves “the livelong day” from tedium. It’s love that makes a bristly beard a comfort and setting the table more ritual than chore. Love makes the repetition of “dew on grass / and frost on grass,” welcome again and again; it bids the day welcome—the days, really. And not despite their approximate sameness but because of it, the days become plainsong. They hum with the familiar, which is, to some degree, change.
“Wanted the poem to be a place of singing,” reads “Autumn Song.” And later: “Wanted the poem to be the ordinary work of cooking, commuting, bickering, thinking.” And later still: “Wanted the poem to be a kind of singing. / Wanted the poem to be rain on a field and a tractor looping and looping.” Let me attest that these poems are what the writer wanted; they’re “rain on a field and “a tractor looping and looping.” They’re song. And, for Lorsung, they’re “ordinary work.” But Pattern-Book is also extraordinary, because in its poems, “life / continues,” steady and shifting, the same and changing, lit by mortality from one side and by love from the other.
