The poems in Christopher Patton's debut collection, Ox , are about seeing clearly, and also about relinquishing the need to see with specific intent. Through this tension they find their idiosyncratic magic. Like the twelfth-century Buddhist parable of the ox-herder, Ox begins with a search, and its open-ended journey-one full of sprawling, strange, syntactically complex, cantilevering byways-establishes the form of its religious and philosophical reach. Moving across lucently rendered North American landscapes, Patton ...
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The poems in Christopher Patton's debut collection, Ox , are about seeing clearly, and also about relinquishing the need to see with specific intent. Through this tension they find their idiosyncratic magic. Like the twelfth-century Buddhist parable of the ox-herder, Ox begins with a search, and its open-ended journey-one full of sprawling, strange, syntactically complex, cantilevering byways-establishes the form of its religious and philosophical reach. Moving across lucently rendered North American landscapes, Patton catches a glimpse of his own spiritual setting, and in the process suggests a new direction, perhaps an entirely new scale, for Canadian nature poetry. Brimming with beautifully-controlled descriptions and startlingly precise word-play, Ox is an image of vulnerability before the world's plenitude. It is an astonishing achievement.
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