on Ian Patterson

Seriousness needn’t be heavy. Indeed, T.S. Eliot saw the way to Tennyson’s heart through a critical mode that kept things light: ‘By looking innocently at the surface we are most likely to come to the depths, to the abyss of sorrow’. Of course, true innocence can’t know this, and only knows itself in being lost, and Eliot, faux-naïf, thereby takes on the misdirectional air of a whistling pickpocket. But nonetheless the approach wisely marks out the complex intimacies a critic – and a poet – might find between the light-handed and the heavy-hearted. Skimming across the surface of Ian Patterson’s Collected Poems, things are similarly innocent-looking: ‘So to Speak’, ‘Prattle’, ‘This and That’, ‘Quite Right’, ‘Easy to Say’, ‘No Way’, ‘Small Change’, Bound To Be, ‘Nothing Doing’, ‘What Ever Next?’. Such phrases bear the unassuming nonchalance of small talk. Taken into the pressurised atmosphere of verse, however, their breezy speaking sounds a sudden, sorrowful depth: Bound To Be describes a phatic existentialism; ‘Nothing Doing’ gives a Heideggerian impetus to absence; ‘No Way’ is theatrical disbelief and a genuine dead-end. These small gestures of nothing, then, are not, in Patterson’s hands, for nothing: they are the forms of speech – at first glance so innocent – that pass most unthinkingly between us and, in doing so, utter the hidden worlds in which we always are.

Therein abstraction meets humanity: ‘a bit open, that floating tired light seemed to fade the people / gone, an infinity gone, touches of life curving off some other way’ (‘Cold Again’). The infinite is beyond any of us, ...