Bøker av Patrick Warner

As apt to channel the confessionalism of Anne Sexton as the red-in-tooth-and-claw nature poetry of Ted Hughes, Patrick Warners voice ranges freely from the colloquial to the baroque. Over the past fifteen years, by harboring and honoring such fraught tensions. In Octopus we have him at his best.

Like the mole of the title, Patrick Warner’s poems accomplish great feats while disguised as pleasingly modest creatures of accident and stealth. But whereas moles mine the soil, Mole mines the rich depths of imagination, empathy, and insight. A Newfoundlander, Warner takes the richness of his land''s distinctive argot and singular humor, crafting a strange, dreamlike world that sharpens our perception of this one. A moral poet, and one fully engaged with his people and home, Warner can be read both seriously and for pure enjoyment by anyone, anywhere. As with the best poets, he takes overlooked corners and negligible objects, turning them into prisms, portals, tuning forks, and flint rocks. What we thought was the case may well turn out to be otherwise. This is a collection that is bracing, pleasing, and thoroughly rewarding.

Patrick Warner's Perfection makes a carnival of our most potent and dangerous obsessions. A factory outlet sells designer human parts at cut-rate prices, a midlife crisis becomes a cleansing ritual, a chocolate chip pancake stands accused at trial, and the predatory voice of anorexia speaks to a transfixed audience. Descending the rabbit hole of this wildly imaginative collection, we find ourselves in a field of engagement where the destructive ideals of beauty, politics, art, romantic love, and spirituality are ambushed by roguish parody, acerbic satire, life-affirming laughter, and a hard-won pragmatism. In Perfection, where death is certain and certainty is hell-bent on death, Warner refuses to rest on his laurels, continuing to build on his reputation as one of the most respected voices in Canadian poetry.

Stunned by an unexpected blockbuster art show, three plucky misfits cycle the Camino de Santiago-backward.