Patrick Warner – författare

Patrick Warner's Perfection — the follow-up to his award-winning Mole — makes a carnival of our most potent and dangerous obsessions. A factory outlet sells designer human parts at cut-rate prices, a midlife crisis becomes a cleansing ritual, a chocolate-chip pancake stands accused at trial, and the predatory voice of anorexia speaks to a transfixed audience.In descending the rabbit hole of this wildly imaginative collection, we find ourselves amid a field of engagement where destructive ideals of beauty, politics, art, romantic love, and spirituality are ambushed by roguish parody, acerbic satire, life-affirming laughter, and a hard-won pragmatism. And while Warner's trademark playfulness and formal ingenuity remain intact, his classic arms-length objectivity gives ground to a private and autobiographical directness of style often evaded in his earlier work.In Perfection, where death is certain and certainty is hell-bent on death, Warner refuses to rest on his laurels, continuing to build on his reputation as one of the most respected voices in Canadian poetry.

Like the mole of the title, Patrick Warner’s poems accomplish great feats while disguised as pleasingly modest creatures of accident and stealth. But whereas moles mine the soil, Mole mines the rich depths of imagination, empathy, and insight. A Newfoundlander, Warner takes the richness of his land's distinctive argot and singular humor, crafting a strange, dreamlike world that sharpens our perception of this one. A moral poet, and one fully engaged with his people and home, Warner can be read both seriously and for pure enjoyment by anyone, anywhere. As with the best poets, he takes overlooked corners and negligible objects, turning them into prisms, portals, tuning forks, and flint rocks. What we thought was the case may well turn out to be otherwise. This is a collection that is bracing, pleasing, and thoroughly rewarding.

As apt to channel the confessionalism of Anne Sexton as the red-in-tooth-and-claw nature poetry of Ted Hughes, Patrick Warner's voice ranges freely from the colloquial to the baroque. By harboring and honoring such fraught tensions, Warner has built a taut and original body of work. In Octopus we have him at his best.