Octopus

Description

Like its totem creature, the poems inOctopusare canny, slippery, and metamorphic. As apt to channel the confessionalism of Anne Sexton as the red-in-tooth-and-claw nature poetry of Ted Hughes, Warners voice ranges freely from the colloquial to the baroque. Over the past fifteen years, by harbouring and honouring such fraught tensions, Warner has been building one of the most taut and original bodies of work in Canadian literature. InOctopuswe have him at his best.PRAISE FOR OCTOPUSWarner has a wonderful skill for wielding rhythm and rhymeengaging and memorable. Canadian LiteraturePRAISE FOR PATRICK WARNERWarners poems can be comical, tender, brutal they are always enlightening in their implied connections, sublime in their musical inventiveness.Sunday IndependentI dont know if anyone in contemporary poetry is bearing more eloquent, precisely strange witness to the certainty of their doubts than Warner.ARC Poetry Magazine