Juniata County by Thomas Patterson

You can’t read a Thomas Patterson poem without being moved by the language and musicality of his lines. Patterson’s intelligent use of phrase and image draws the reader into his poems. Poetry about our past, about the lives of parents, is often flawed by sentimentality. In Juniata County, Patterson’s sensitive remembrances are anything but sentimental. He uses beautiful language to take us back in time, The truth is in the cold-rolled steel turned hard against the anvil/riveted into the trestle, on its back in broad combed muscle/beats the belly of serpentine track, and then into the present, the truth is in the Hoyer lift/tracking from hallway to bedroom/where they’ve tucked him under the blankets/in the silly, languorous dusk. These pivots are accomplished with a deft poetic hand. Juniata County may be one man’s poetic memoir, but it speaks for each of us, Patterson’s father our father, his mother our mother, and his hometown our own.

–Colette Jonopulos, Tiger’s Eye Press

Often, as with an attic that one walks back into carefully touching each stored object so that it suddenly springs to life, these poems, with their packed images and subtle control of form make the present moment a rhythmic reincarnation of the past, an “arc of love and loss.”  War games and Ravensbruk and wicker chairs and blue eyes like “two hopeless balloons” coil into the long black hair, which falls and entangles every word spoken here and emits the “truth.”

–Francine Ringold, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief, Nimrod International Journal