Description
Christopher Patton’s translations from the Exeter Booka volume of Old English poetry used, over centuries, to store gold foil for illumination of texts thought more meaningfuldraw the poems into a modern idiom without quieting their unearthly strangeness. His sense of their passage through time also yields “Hearth,” a take on “The Earthwalker” that uses type and white space, speech and silence, to embody the “play of duration and flux” consuming both the physical manuscript, and the worried, reflective speakers of its poems.
About the author
Christopher Patton is a Canadian poet living in the United States, where he teaches courses on ecopoetics and visual poetry at Western Washington University. His asemic visual poetry has been shown at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the Whatcom Museum. Patton’s books include Ox, whose first section won the Paris Review’s long poem prize, and Curious Masonry, an earlier volume of Old English translations. He blogs at theartofcompost.com.
