Pat Farrington
Title: Web of Being
ISBN: 978-1-910855-91-1
Pages: 36
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Title: Lifespun
ISBN: 978-1-910855-61-4
Pages: 44
Prices: 10.00 Sterling (Hard Copy)
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LIFESPUN
Following Pat Farrington’s first collection, Imperatives, Lifespun focuses on family life. Many of the poems make me smile: in ‘A Mother’s Place, ‘naughty little mother’ is ‘harangued by slender daughter’ for various misdeeds, such as ‘daring to buy rainbow-coloured tights’ and ‘preferring human voices’ to text messages. I recognise this! ‘Alien shore’, about an unborn baby ‘swimming like a fish/ revolving in blood-warm sea,/ unfurling apprentice limbs/ in your one-room universe’, is breathtakingly beautiful, but the most poignant and moving, for me, is ‘Roots’, in which a fallen oak leads to thoughts on death and roots that endure in memory.
Angela Royston
Title: Imperatives
ISBN: 978-1-910855-42-3
Pages: 31
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IMPERATIVES
I love these poems. Every time I read them I find something new to enjoy. They move between ordinary and extraordinary habitats. Her observations point to the danger and fragility of Nature, such as a Moray eel lurking in a coral reef and fledglings pushed by their parents into the river to fend for themselves. The struggle to survive affects people, too, in poems about drought and insect pests, but the destructiveness of people is never far away. The final poems describe the desolation created by extreme climate change.
Angela Royston
Looking down from Space, or scanning the land from the perspective of an angered Earth Giant or a witness of Apocalypse, the poet almost always zooms in before long to consider Nature in close up. Perhaps the main ‘imperative’ here is to look closely, and then more closely still, at what is around us and at what is endangered. The work speaks of a commitment to what we think of as ‘Nature’, a concern about its destruction, and also an awareness of the ‘otherness’ of Nature.
Alex Josephy, londongrip. Com
Pat s free-flowing and extraordinarily evocative poems make us experience what she sees in her own backyard, as we watch an insect land on her thumb , the ‘prow of an ark’. But we also feel the heat on our backs as she draws word pictures of lands and creatures far away. In doing so, she helps us to understand our own nature as she holds up a magnifying glass to a beloved and entrancing world and then jolts us into understanding its inherent threats.
Without being obvious, she creates a life cycle of the world, beginning where ‘new-born wings whirr’ and ending, perhaps, where wall-breaking seas invade and ‘metal mandibles’ eat away our paradise. In the last poem, after an Apocalyptic disaster, she leaves us thinking about a bare twig with a ‘smudge of green scarcely breaking its flaky surface’.
Jenny Sharman