Colorado Poets Center
Veronica Patterson
Biography
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Veronica Patterson is a graduate of Cornell University, the University of Michigan, the University of Northern Colorado, and Warren Wilson College (MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry). Her first poetry collection, How to Make a Terrarium, was published by Cleveland State University (1987). Her poetry collection Swan, What Shores? (New York University Press, 2000) was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ 2000 James Laughlin Award and won annual poetry awards from both the Colorado Center for the Book and Women Writing the West. Her chapbook of prose poems This Is the Strange Part was published by Pudding House Publications in Spring 2002. She has also published one collection of poetry and photography, The Bones Remember: A Dialogue, with photographer Ronda Stone (Stone Graphics Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including The Southern Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, The Sun, The Madison Review, The Malahat Review, The Indiana Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Mid-American Review, The Willow Review, The Montserrat Review, The Bloomsbury Review, Willow Springs, The Colorado Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Many Mountains Moving, Coal City Review, Dogwood, New Letters, The Bellingham Review, and The Beloit Poetry Journal. Poems are forthcoming in Many Mountains Moving and Prairie Schooner. Her essay “Comfort Me with Apples” appeared in the Spring 1997 Georgia Review and was selected as a Notable Essay. Her essay “Feast” was published in Pilgrimage in 2003. She has been awarded three residencies at the Ucross Foundation and one at Hedgebrook; she received Individual Artist’s Fellowships from the Colorado Council on the Arts in 1984 and 1997. In September 1999, she was artist-in-residence in Rocky Mountain National Park. Her poem “Postcards” won first place in the Peregrine Poetry Contest (Amherst Writers and Artists); and her poem “Three Photographs Not of My Father” won first prize in the 1997 Salt Hill Journal poetry competition (Syracuse University); her poem “Signatures” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2001; her poem “Unreasonable Shoes” was one of four honorable mentions for the Tor House Prize in 2004. |
Bibliography
Full-length collections
How to Make a Terrarium, Cleveland State University (1987).
Swan, What Shores? (New York University Press, 2000), finalist for
the Academy of American Poets’ 2000 James Laughlin Award, annual poetry
awards from both the Colorado Center for the Book and Women Writing the West.
Chapbook
This Is the Strange Part, Pudding House Publications, 2002, chapbook
of prose poems.
Poetry and photography
The Bones Remember: A Dialogue, with photographer Ronda Stone (Stone
Graphics Press), poetry and photography.
Essays
“Comfort Me with Apples,” Georgia Review, Spring 1997,
selected as a Notable Essay.
“Feast,” Pilgrimage 2003.
“My Griefs to Sing: Creative Writing and Loss,” forthcoming in Teachers
& Writers Collaborative.
Individual poems, a partial listing
The Southern Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, The
Sun, The Madison Review, The Malahat Review, The
Indiana Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Mid-American
Review, The Willow Review, The Montserrat Review, The
Bloomsbury Review, Willow Springs, The Colorado Review,
The Midwest Quarterly, Many Mountains Moving, Coal City
Review, Dogwood, New Letters, The Bellingham Review,
The Beloit Poetry Journal. Poems are forthcoming in Many
Mountains Moving, Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review.
Reviews of Swan, What Shores?
Veronica Patterson shows a striking use of organic form in her
collection of 50 poems, Swan, What Shores? She savors the language
as in “Cwm” (“a lozenge of sound”) and “Language
Skills.” Her emotion, in variations from regular and supple blank
verse to long and short free lines, is subtly registered in events and incidents,
personal and dramatic. Her themes, ranging from simple acts (as in “Combing”)
to nature and metaphysics, are clear and fresh in narration and imagery. —Charles
Guenther, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Veronica Patterson lives in Loveland and writes poetry that is musical, sophisticated,
and fun to read. The imagery here is startlingly fresh, as in a lyric
called “This House”: “Ghosts stream from the round attic
window, gay as rags / on a kite string.” Patterson often uses a
“strategy of excitement,” in order to maintain a high drama:
“From one third-floor window, a man dangles a woman / or he caught her
as she fell.” And everywhere there is a sense of music: the
janitor using a power waxer is a “Partner to the waxer’s slow turns”
and the “keeper of long halls.” These lines are from “Custodian,”
a meditation in which we realize that we are all custodial” in some important
sense. —Peter Thorpe, Rocky Mountain News
Patterson’s “I” is radiant: “I stand in the corner
of light, / cold-tongued and astonished” (“Winter Dessert”).
Or this: “pulling the white sheet / over your bare shoulder
/ I marry you again” (“Marry Me”). —Tom D’Evelyn,
The Providence Sunday Journal
In “Language Skills”—a prose poem whose epigraph by Kierkegaard
warns us against “the sin of poeticizing,”—Patterson injects
a rhythmic fluidity of line into what might otherwise be prose: “When
I was seventeen / and walked on a hill in spring outside Ithaca, / I stepped
on blue flowers whose name I didn’t know / because for once the slope
was ‘carpeted with flowers.’” “I Want to Say Your
Name” is a fine love poem that plays off a conversation between Jesus
and Mary and ends: “And the wind blew between the letters. / Stars
hung low over the peaks of the M / and in the a, a world orbited.”
The poet deals deftly with grief in “Hush”—an apt title because it is what a mother tells a fretting child. The child’s breath and music connect in the last lines of the poem: “Do you wait somewhere in a small cool room for breath / to make you flesh again or music?” —Carlos Reyes, Bibliofiles
Many poems may be from the author’s perspective, yet they are described
from a delicate distance. She occasionally uses flexible line patterns,
keeping always a sturdy thread of thought-provoking mental pictures. Some
poems consist of matter-of-fact realism, while others border on the metaphysical.
All of it winds around an intimate world with transparent layers of symbolism
and universal meaning.
Patterson is a delightful, strong poet. Her poems do not disappoint at the end and are consistently well-poised. This book has work worth sharing, reciting, and remembering. —Aimee Merizon, Fore Word
For Patterson, the Entities are sometimes birds, sometimes snows—or sleep,
or the form of a music box or a janitor. Whatever their guise, they are almost
always, as the poet writes, “slivers that prick us into being.”
...
Awakening to being is the recurrent theme. The poems are always alert to the life of things and the revelation of spirit they may contain. Maple syrup dripped on snow in “sweet tracery” places the speaker in a “corner of light / cold tongued and astonished.” ...
For its depth of spirit, and for its beauty, readers will want to search out
this remarkable book. —Evan Oakley, The Montserrat Review
Page last updated July 30, 2004
For page information,
contact Dr. Rita Jones (RitaJones@alum.albertson.edu)
or Dr. Robert King (rwendellking@yahoo.com)