Carcanet online book launch: Pattern-book by Éireann Lorsung

Éireann Lorsung will be reading from and talking about her latest poetry collection Pattern-book with Jon McGregor. Published by Manchester’s Carcanet Press, this is the first UK release by the author of three widely praised previous US collections, introducing her to UK readers for the first time.

Across four sections – ‘Spelling’, ‘Drawing’, ‘Elegies’ and ‘Singing’ – Pattern-book’s sonnets, couplets, quatrains, prose poems, alphabetical formal devices and even invented forms interrogate the ways that language can and can’t hold what we lose. With a unique style, these lyric poems think through how time passes and how art relates to that passage – both in its making and its capacity to recall and memorialise – and draw on family life, art history, grief, ageing and the natural world. Woven of recurring images, threaded through with filaments of others’ poems – from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks – Lorsung’s delight in form brings pattern to vivid life.

World rights were acquired for Carcanet Press directly from the author by editor and associate publisher John McAuliffe, who commented: ‘Éireann Lorsung sent some poems to PN Review last year which stopped my fellow editor Michael Schmidt and me in our tracks. While we knew a little about Éireann, whose books have been praised and received prizes in the US, we loved these new poems’ secure grip on the shape of their own expression and their attention to the world and people’s feelings about the world.’

Éireann Lorsung was born and grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and moved to Ireland in 2022 to teach writing at University College Dublin. This spring, she holds the Mary Routt Endowed Chair in Writing at Scripps College, California. She works and teaches in a field of images, objects, movement and texts. Her collections include Music for Landing Planes By, Her book and The Century (Milkweed Editions), which won the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Poetry.

Novelist Jon McGregor – hosting the event – was an early reader of the manuscript, and says: ‘In these wonderful, breath-stopping and heart-enlarging poems, Éireann Lorsung asks only that we pay close attention – to the text, to the world, to the way the world becomes note by note the text – while she pays close attention alongside us. These are poems conducted at ground level, at walking pace, attentive to the changing of the light, of the seasons, of the certainties we thought we were growing up with.’

Jon McGregor is the author of four novels and two story collections. He is the winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, and has been long-listed three times for the Man Booker Prize, most recently in 2017 for Reservoir 13. He is professor of creative writing at the University of Nottingham, England, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters.

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.