Dark Flowering Fields by Thomas Patterson

Thomas Patterson’s work has appeared in seventy-five journals and magazines, including New Orleans Review, The South Carolina Review, The Antioch Review, Connecticut River Review, and Confrontation, among many others. His recent work appears in Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, National Edition, 2024 (prize finalist poem), and he has a prize winning poem in the Elizabeth Royal Patton Poetry competition, from Clare Songbirds Publishing House (2025); Two previous poetry chapbooks have been published by Finishing Line Press: Juniata County and Village of Doomed Women. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Thomas is a graduate of Northeastern University (MA in English Literature) and Rhode Island College (Med in Counseling Psychology) and is retired from his positions as School Adjustment Counselor in the Fall River School Department and as Instructor in English at Bristol Community College, in Fall River, Massachusetts. He lives in Westport, Massachusetts.

PRAISE:

Thomas Patterson’s Dark Flowering Fields, is a gut-punch hidden in the velvet glove of poetry. In “Not Crossing Borders,” he writes: “in stanza two, the sun, sensing doom for this undertaking, is a ball of yellow butter / splashing its impotent disgust at the builders and the border guards /with smothering heat, but / to no avail.” This wry self-consciousness about the construction of the poem, and its inability to effect change is telling These poems hit hard, yet grin while delivering their blows. They display blistering attacks on the state of the world, as they swing hard at dehumanizers, greedy corporations, and those who abuse power, ranging from Mariupol, to the Sudan, to the forced laborers of Rumbula forest, to ravaged cities in the United States; the poems also pause to acknowledge the particular, as in these lines: “please notify if a dark beautiful flower / pushes up through the ground in the spring / where my brother was shot and killed in 2015.” Or these from “Elegy for Steven”: “these are the darkening window blinds billowing like sails in the autumn wind / rocking us to sleep / one unto another / lower them / lower them.” In the closing lines of “Elegy,” the window blinds are lowered like sails, yet the imagery suggests the winding sheet of the dead, and the ropes used to lower a body into its grave. There’s angry craft at work here, delivering essential “Planet News” (the title of the second section) These poems rip and roar, but they also whisper: Bend low. Slow down. Listen. Be disturbed. Let your empathetic nerve attune.
–David Allen Sullivan, former poet laureate of Santa Cruz County, CA., author, most recently, of Black Butterflies Over Baghdad

Thomas Patterson is a gifted poet whose work will remain emblazoned in your memory for a long sweet time. Dark Flowering Fields is an abundance of hope and affirmation that life is quite beautiful and filled with quiet but intense moments. “World News Tonight,” “America, of Thee I Sing”, and “Save The Children” are powerful poems of witness. This entire collection will activate your mind and heart at these perilous and crucial moments in our collective history.

–Virgil Suarez, author of AMERIKAN CHERNOBYL and, most recently, the chapbook, RED FACED POEMS