Babel Fish

(Paperback)

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Jillian Pattinson's first full-length book of poetry includes portrait, lyrical, narrative and ekphrastic poems in free verse and novel forms. It won the 2010 Alec Bolton Prize for an unpublished manuscript. "The enigmatic vortex of the gyre, performing a fine balance between order and disorder, becomes the template for Jillian Pattinson's poetry. Even her lists work as centrifuges, spinning us out into what she calls 'the unmade world'. Her poetry will bring you into a world suspended in its fall, its gyre, somewhere between chaos and beauty. This kind of poetry is addictive to the ear and the mind. I know of nothing else quite like the way Pattinson's poetry can speak of the questions, silences, birds, deaths, and the strangely shifting names of things in the world. Like a journal of half-remembered dreams, with a Borgesian minor magic, sharing the insight of the blind with an uncluttered vision, this poetry does new things with the psyche, the heart, and with the mind." -Kevin Brophy