House Crossing

Laurie Patton

House Crossing is a book of 32 poems about where we live or, more properly, dwell, with each poem entitled by a different attribute of domestic architecture as it is commonly known: Copula, eaves, attic, beams, etc. Such might lend itself to description, but--reminiscent in part of Ronald Johnson's oeuvre (The Foundations, The Spires, and The Ramparts)--in the vision of poet and scholar Laurie Patton each component becomes alive to an actuality beyond physical construct: The poetics of how we hold our ground, even if it is in flux--or as she writes, "A river runs... below the house." The instigation for this poetic cycle is Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, with this collection a homage to that classic phenomenological analysis. As she writes in her introduction, House Crosing arose as "a straightforward observation about the endurance of Bachelard’s work: if a poetics is good enough, and I believe Bachelard’s is, then it does not only comment on poetry, but can give rise to poetry as well." What Patton gives rise to is in part an opportunity for us each to live more evocatively in our days and nights in each our own place, building a being, as "Noah’s ark stands / at the end of our hallway."

Spring 2018