Poetry book of the month: Mind your language

Pattern-book
Éireann Lorsung
Carcanet, £12.99, pp108

If you’ve ever attended one of those immersive art experiences that offer viewers the chance to step inside a painting, then reading Pattern-book by Éireann Lorsung feels a little like that, except here the brushstrokes are made of words. In her vibrant and stirring UK debut, Lorsung – an American poet and artist based in Dublin, where she teaches writing at University College – offers a mesmerising portrait of the silent patterns that paint our world. From the sprinkle of snow across a sidewalk to the scatter of crumbs on a tablecloth, each metaphor in this collection unfolds like a mural, deliciously rich in colour, texture and tone.

This preoccupation with patterns stems from a childhood enthusiasm for collecting sweet wrappers from a local Russian grocery store and deciphering their Cyrillic secret codes: “We saved them all up. They were beautiful.” While some of Lorsung’s patterns are dazzling, I am drawn to those more discreet. In Rose Country Inventory, she finds glory in the grubbiness of chimney pots smoking from crowded terraced houses. Elsewhere, beauty sparkles in the secondhand clothes purchased from a “thrift-shop’s dollar counters”.

The generosity of this gaze seems to reflect the speaker’s experience growing up: “I thought we were rich,” she admits. “We were just barely breaking even.” Even the ancient spill of sun is rendered strange and new, as in Minneapolis, Early Spring: “At this time of year in this town / the sky is full of boats and branches, / wreathes of fishing line, light / and water tied into bouquets.”

What fascinates me most, however, is Lorsung’s thought-provoking meditation on the patterns of language itself. “What is a word?” she asks. “What use is language flattened, dried in books?” At times, these poems teeter on the edge of an existential vortex: “What’s the point of this world?” we are asked. But, like the humble patterns she chases, Lorsung does not proclaim to hold the answers, only an inspiring curiosity for the questions they stir.

These questions arise with the ghost of John Berryman, who killed himself in 1972 by jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Lorsung’s home town of Minneapolis. Alongside other American poets such as Emily Dickinson and Edna St Vincent Millay, Berryman haunts this collection from the outset. He’s one of the influential “poet-fathers” that Lorsung likes to “lean on”, not least for his blend of chaos and humour.

Similarly, Lorsung’s deep reflections are balanced out by her entertaining takes on suburban life, social media and the secret life of university lecturers. In Vocational Education, for example, a teacher impulsively decides to “raise / the sashes of those dark-wood windows, step / high over the ground-floor sills, and lower themselves / out onto the plush grass”, leaving behind a bewildered throng of “two hundred gawking undergraduates”. Why? The spring blossom is simply too beautiful to miss, as “bulb flowers stick their slender fingers / out of the rich earth”, beckoning the poet to take a closer look.

Particularly enjoyable are her lessons in linguistic invention. In Attunement, she delights in creating new words such as “seatruth” and “rivertruth” while swimming in the company of “seatrout” and “rivertrout”. It is a playful invitation to let the imagination drift, to embrace the slipperiness of the world and the words we use to capture it. Or, as Lorsung succinctly summarises, the “thing I value most in any line— / drawn, made, wrote, thought; in fantasy or fact— / is flexibility”. This is where her true love of patterns lies, not in their repetition but their possibility to lead us down unexpected yet rewarding paths.

Pattern-book is published on 29 May. Preorder a copy at observershop.co.uk for a special 20% launch offer. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph: Ann Bartges