Songen

de Patrick Friesen

"The poems in this new collection move like swifts. They alight, but only briefly, before their smooth lifts, and hair-trigger turns take us places we had not expected to go. Each poem, one sentence long and separated by commas, tracks the movement of the mind. Occasionally using words and phrases from Middle English and Low German, the poems touch on musical influences, the changes in language over the centuries and on the dissolutions, dilemmas and inevitabilities of old age. "Moonlight sassing the room, ...hear them, them strange voices, ...a lonely cellist persists, dangling sound from a string, ...but a last love, too late to last long." A beautiful body of work, the poet at his finest."--