Patrick James Errington’s Poetry Collection, The Swailing

Fine, flat, slim, and white, in the hand it’s a bone of a book. The title, unassuming in lowercase, hangs over David Drummond’s black ash cover design like blood on a naturalist’s slide. Held, there is something avian about this book’s bone. There are six appearances or disappearances of birds altogether in Patrick James Errington’s new collection, the swailing, published as part of McGill-Queens University Press’s Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series. Among these are ‘birds in the distance, rising like a cloud of breath, or maybe myth,’ ‘the field birdless, brimming,’ ‘slightness like a bird’s body in a plastic bag.’ Because Errington’s poems are often discreet, delicate, and intimately architectural, I am tempted to continue my naturalist’s metaphor in this certain register of absences, elegies, and forensics. The swailing’s register’s another, though. ‘Was birds,’ Errington writes, ‘Was threat set loose this shriek of starlings from the gloom. Was wonder. Wondered then.’ If I lay the book on its spine, the swailing’s Rorschach design is tree line burning black, its ash its birds flown to the flyleaves. Errington’s collection is meant to be read at different angles. ‘Was wonder. Wondered then’ – as wonder names both action and its object, the swailing’s poems mediate creation with loss.

‘Lucie Brock-Broido used to say that poems are troubled into being,’ Errington told me, ‘and the idea of swailing, an older term for containing wildfires through a controlled burn, reflects this, language as fire.’ I spoke to Errington in wildfire summer. New York’s orange noon stunk with pine smoke from burnt Canada. I know nothing of trees past trees in poems, but in this regard, the swailing is a Canadian book. It is troubled into being part of continuities with Oliver Goldsmith’s 1825 poem, ‘The Rising Village,’ in which pines ‘descend, / crackling’ under axes until ‘soon from their boughs the curling flames arise, / mount into air, and redden all the skies,’ as well as with Milton Acorn’s ‘jackpine’ sonnets, their form jagged as branches, that share with a degree of assonance, concern with structure, and rhetorical tentativeness with Errington’s poems. Errington’s native Alberta is a liminal presence like smoke in the swailing. The ‘frostbitten landscapes’ and ‘haunted geographies of home, forest, field, fire, and snow’ that Errington’s reviewers observe, present like a ‘series of black and white photographs,’ allude to this. But this is not regional pastoral verse, just as Canada’s wildfires cannot be said to be distant concerns. ‘We have changed our relationship to fire,’ the Washington Post notes. The historian, Stephen Pyne, claims that we have entered the ‘Age of the Pyrocene.’

For Errington, who now lives and teaches in Edinburgh, the swailing’s ‘forest, field, fire, and snow’ are also his speakers’ ecologies of intimacy and self. ‘I have so much Alberta in me,’ Errington writes, ‘my body, atlas cedar at my core, / bright as ribbon lightning, little needled, now bare, now budding flame.’ Such a line is characteristic of the swailing, self as the equipoise – even if only for a moment through recognition – of cedar and ‘budding fire,’ pivoting on a needle. Like wonder, the word needle can become description or action in use. ‘I had in mind the possibilities of poetic constraint,’ Errington remarked, ‘as being in part expressive and transformative, as well as a movement to control.’ One of the tragic ironies of North American wildfires has been the possibility that decades of suppressing swailing fuels uncontrollable burns. In this sense, Errington’s motif is an ars poetica, swailing as writing what must be written as habit, season, and ritual, ‘fire to manage fire.’ If it must be written by someone from somewhere, the swailing suggests, it equally writes someone and somewhere into being and communion.

The swailing’s dense ecosystem is private, public, literary, personal; it is managed with both impassioned and what Timothy Donnelly calls ‘forensic’ constraint. Poems throughout are ‘to’ Lucie, Max, Tim, John, Jackie. Others are ‘after’ – in conversation with – work by Richie Hoffman, Kaveh Akbar, Jack Spicer, William Shakespeare, and Robert Rauschenberg. As Errington remarks, a poet’s work is ‘an inheritance of many years, many hands, and many words.’ With the swailing, Errington’s voice is new growth in such inheritances. An aspiring poet might learn to find their own voice writing ‘after’ poems like ‘Never Say Never Say Never’ or ‘Not an Elegy.’ At the same time, Errington’s voice is never reduceable to the forms of common constrained loss or revelation it channels. That Errington should pick as his title what Robert Macfarlane calls ‘one of those scalpel-sharp words that are untranslatable without remainder’ ought not surprise. There is also, Macfarlane suggests, ‘no lone tree language, but a forest of tree languages,’ not existing ‘as archives but as wunderkammers’ in our speech. In this sense, the swailing in toto reflects the speaker’s charge in ‘This Was Something More,’ namely ‘not grief, safekeeping.’

The swailing is available from McGill-Queens University Press. Dr. Patrick James Errington is a poet, translator, critic, editor, and academic from the praries of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of two chapbooks, Glean and Field Studies. His poems feature in magazines, journals, and anthologies including Poetry Review, Poetry International, Best New Poets, Boston Review, Diagram, and others. His work has received numerous awards including The National Poetry Competition, The London Magazine Poetry Competition, the McLellan Poetry Prize, the 2020 Callan Gordon/Scottish New Writers Award, and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award from the Writer’s Trust of Canada. He is a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches literature, creative writing, and is the primary and co-investigator on several interdisciplinary research projects.