Lynn Pattison

Walking Back the Cat Lynn Pattison

Poetry. The poems in WALKING BACK THE CAT surrender nothing by splintering into tiny, rough symphonies each, somehow both raw and polished. In this small book, poem after poem feels nailed down, only because the act of reading them is an elevation. They fly woodwinds and electric guitar. The poems are stylistically various, and multiply 'landscaped, ' but they immediately breach the white frames of the pages that separate them. There is energy enough here to cover it all, from Singapore to the Yucatan. And there is something magical and yet oracular about this reckless stance a refusal to organize the garden politely. The voice, the biggest constant, holds everything together, urgent and in love with every fiber of experience inward and outward. The collection can be described by one of Pattison's own sentences, 'A map / ...to study, curling, tacked above breakfast / on the wall during long river winters.'--David Dodd Lee. Lynn Pattison, who is a lifelong Michigan resident, has published