Ox

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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