Veronica Patterson

Veronia Patterson

Veronica Patterson’s work is rooted in close observation of the world and a love of words.

Her poetry is “musical, sophisticated, and fun to read. The imagery here is startlingly fresh...”

—Peter Thorpe, Rocky Mountain News

Thresh & Hold
Poems by Veronica Patterson

Winner of the 2009 Gell Prize for Poetry

ISBN 978-0-9819018-3-1
Big Pencil Press $15.95
Click Here to Purchase

From the introduction by poet Lola Haskins, who selected the book for the prize:

“What I like about Thresh & Hold is how naturally it makes its moves. As the story opens, the dreaming speaker is drawn into an alley strewn with flowers and fruit, which ... creates a sense of the forthcoming abundance ...”

“From this beginning, the poet journeys outward to her mother as a thousand-faced cup, to her father as a red-haired boy, to the samovar of a great-aunt, who ‘died of having lived.’”

“I can only congratulate the poet on a fine, heartfelt, delicate work.”

From Thresh & Hold. . .

Threshold

The night you lay dying,
there was a space around the house
into which nothing untoward could come,
in which nothing but your dying could take place.
It was a hole in the field,
like the hush into which a child is born. As if
at all times, or whenever necessary,
shafts of quiet pierce the world – we don’t know
the ways of the soul.

But we know how artists make a map
of somewhere foreign, then telescope one spot forward,
to show details. You lay on the bed,
breathing hard. A lens of lamplight. Your husband
on one side of you, I on the other. We told small, round stories,
beads on a string we passed over you. As if
that were our job, while yours was counting
out your breaths to the last.

When I left, I took the waiting
with me. But it wasn’t waiting; there was no time in it.
I woke before dawn, with these words,
“Why do you seek the dead among the living?” The call came,
like news of someone arrived safely in another country.
I am always surprised that the word threshold
hinges on just one h. Each time, I write one for thresh
and one for hold.

Among Patterson's collections of poetry is the
award-winning Swan, What Shores?

"Characterized by remarkable invention and wit, in rare combination with philosophical depth and genuine feeling, Swan, What Shores? ... deserves wide circulation."

—Leonard Trawick, Professor Emeritus and former editor,
Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Books

Other books by Veronica Patterson

Learn More
about
the Author

Patterson lives and writes in Loveland, Colorado, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains

“She savors the language....Her emotion, in variations from regular and subtle blank verse to long and short free lines and prose, is subtly registered...”

—Charles Guenther, St. Louis Post-Dispatch