From the Wilderness, with Love
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- Letter from the Editor – Pree - […] Kei, remaining or rendering oneself inscrutable is also Adam Patterson’s preoccupation. In From the Wilderness with Love he worries…
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Dear Adam,
Thank you for this. Vegetable Seller Barbados made me remember a poem in my first collection Somersault, titled Take This Back:
Take This Back
Take this back to Devon
England, the homeland you
left to photograph me here
balancing fruit on my head.
Shall we title the autochrome
market woman? It will
please your wife in her crisscrossed
corset laced like an extra spine.
The stiff armour turning flesh
into an insect’s taut abdomen,
a Wasp’s precise profile.
So take it back, a small stamp
stored in your thick album,
she will lift a magnifying glass
to make me surface within
the blur of its round net.
As she looks with a Cyclops eye,
won’t she think my bananas
curl in rows, like a large
feather on a garden party hat?
I share it with you writer to writer in gratitude for your brilliant piece. It seems as if Un-Naming is an important part of the ability to Name. May we writers and poets be so engaged in this arduous and exciting process!
Nancy