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Rarely does a poet glow with grace on every page, but Patrick Carrington is no every day poet.
Carrington won the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Prize for 2006. In 2007, Thirst burst forth a tall glass of water. Cool, refreshing, clear as cubes of ice.
Patrick Carrington begins our ride on celestial wings with these words from the first poem in the chapbook, "Learning History in Nursery School":
For a month, rain slid down on silk ropes like a spider was wrapping us in a sad and sturdy home.From there, Thirst just gets better and better. Whether filling readers with visions "blurry as puddles of gasoline" or schooling us with the first lessons of grace, Carrington treats the metaphor with delicate touches and delivers every turn of phrase like a new art. Nothing stale lives here. One of my favorite lines is
I recognize my middle-age nostalgia for old rebellions.Like the Magnificat, one walks away from these lines, taken from "The Information Age," with a soft knowing that great things, even if we've never seen them ourselves, once happened and can happen again. The entire poem just rolls with incredible lines, as if taken from the highest echelon of the ionosphere:
I buy a round with my right hand and lecture a legion of lost angels on the witness protection program of our lost souls. … We pay for our sins in bad gravity. … We've lived in the thrillparks of fast delight, have become malignant charismatics like the kerosene drunks of the Depression, philosophizing on the black holes of our lives … We say things ain't like they used to be, wear self-pity on our sleeves.In the midst of his own sublimity, Carrington unintentionally alludes to his own lyrical splendor:
In each word there is a glory, in each glory a story.And in a phantom ending, Carrington reminds us to be brave again, but not today, proving that poetry is not all petals of beauty dipped in rose red wine. It's better. Even when cynical or when buttfugly. One forgets in reading Thirst that Carrington's poetry is full of alliteration, enjambment, simile. The elements are there, but they aren't kicking you in the shins. There is something deeper, more meaningful in the words themselves and the ideas behind them. His poetry is not mere word play; it is playfulness on a higher level. He pulls the strings of empyreal idea and lofty ideals through the buttonholes of verbs and nouns. These are poems of a new age without genuflecting to the New Age. Twenty-two well-crafted poems. Not a single bent nail. A glance through the table of contents reveals a mind that puts as much energy into crafting the right title as the poem that goes with it:
