Controlled Burn: a review of the swailing by Patrick James Errington
Reviewer: Dawn Macdonald
Fire, mutable and flickering, assumes diverse forms within Patrick James Errington’s collection the swailing: love, grief, pain, time, water (we’ll come back to this one), the spaces between words, the space between the word and the thing. Or perhaps, one should say, that some of these are fire, or the action of fire, and some are firebreaks made by burning—hence, the swailing. From the introductory note, “… setting fire to carefully controlled tracts of forest and field in an effort to limit the wildfires that otherwise sweep across the landscape … is sometimes called backburn, muirburn, or, in certain places, swailing.”
Water can quench fire, yet both of these opposing elements may have identical effects. Fire and water, in certain circumstances, can each be seen to cleanse, consume, damage, or destroy. Over half of the poems in the swailing contain references to water in one form or another: rain, dew, rivers, seas, dishwater, “a scum of grey / around the bath”. In the first titled poem of the collection (which follows an untitled opening piece), bodies are retrieved drowned from “the almost- / iced-over river dripping up the bank” and a few lines further on “You could … wake / with water in your mouth, water instead / of a name.” Rain drips down walls and windows; it is a light rain or it is “hushing the last of the light.” Rivers and bodies bend around one another in “White Lies”. “There’s / a mirror for you to wash upon / / as though it were a riverbank” in “Motel”. The whole collection abounds with “Wet bursts / of presence” (“Low Tide at the End of the Peffer Burn”), and it isn’t lost on the reader that rivers are associated with death and the underworld as well as with rebirth.
Death, grief, and loss are wound throughout the poems of this book. Deaths are implied, are historical, are predicted—the poet himself may be dying, but “carefully”. Lovers and loves have been lost; parents are referenced in the past tense. Pain is explicit in the body, spreading and crackling. There are problems with putting such things into words: “Days I feel // as if written, every movement measurable, every grief / just the name for grief.” The gap between the name and the named seems to function as a kind of firebreak, giving just that distance to keep the self from being wholly consumed in the flame of experience.
No one freezes to death
in the word field, no matter how cold.
Physical space between words is also used in intentional ways to show fire and burn. The untitled opening poem has a tongue of negative-space flame licking through it; wide separation is used now and then within a line of an otherwise conventionally stanzaic poem to create little breaks and openings within a text. Errington demonstrates fine handling of all the elements of craft; this is very much controlled burn.
A glance through the book gives an impression of regularity and order—Errington is fond of two and three-line stanzas, as well as one-page blocks of text with fairly regular line lengths, and a seven-part series of “Field Notes” turns out to be a sonnet sequence (unrhymed, and not strictly iambic pentameter, but coming in somewhere approximately similar). His vocabulary is rich and precise. He attends closely to stresses and rhythms, to sound and echo.
Technically a debut collection (following two chapbooks), the swailing builds on an impressive history of journal publications and awards. Errington was the winner of the 2022 Writer’s Trust of Canada RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, and the book itself won the 2024 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize.
the swailing is searing, wrenching, astonishing—in the end, the power of Errington’s words exceeds anything that can be said about them.
Patrick James Errington is an award-winning poet and recipient of the 2022 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Originally from Alberta, he now lives in Scotland, where he teaches at the University of Edinburgh.