poems by

Patrick Carrington

Poetry book, 88 pages, cover price $12

($10 if ordered from the MSR Online Bookstore)

ISBN: 978-1-59948-042-8

Release date: 2006

Patrick Carrington is alive and well, teaching creative writing in southern New Jersey. He lives on a quiet beach with his family and is the poetry editor of the web-based art & literary journal Mannequin Envy (www.mannequinenvy.com), where he can be contacted, should you take a notion. He has been nominated for a 2007 Pushcart Prize, and recently returned from a creative residency in Port Townsend, WA. He has work forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Rattle, The Marlboro Review and other places of varying interest. This is his first collection.

Plainly put, Patrick Carrington’s poetry shines. Rise, Fall, and Acceptance is nothing short of an excellent achievement. Aside from its obvious value as an eclectic and entertaining collection of poetry, it also could be used to teach aspiring poets the importance of word choice, the line break, and the use of stanzas. As an editor, poet, nonfiction author and writing instructor, I have too little time to read others’ works for pleasure, but I will always make an exception for Carrington.

Harvey Stanbrough
Editor, The Raintown Review,
Author, Writing Realistic Dialogue & Flash Fiction,
Punctuation for Writers (nonfiction)
and Beyond the Masks (poetry collection),
nominated in 2005 for the National Book Award

The lyric narratives of this book are grounded in a strong sense of the past and fundamental respect for the events that shape our lives. Patrick Carrington has a feel for the thoughts and emotions that often pass unrevealed. I can feel this poet’s love of language and his deep sense of truth in every poem.

Bob Hicok

His Dresden Boots

Troubled below air force relics,
grandfather’s flying boots buckled
with a certain red weight. They’d long lost
their tan and absorbed an umber wrinkle,

a day burnt from its morning peace.
I remember the embers in his eyes as he said
they were both on the floor and on his feet forever,
that he would never wear nor remove them again.
And that they talked to him. While he confessed,

heat flushed his scored face
like the leather’s oiled-in penance,
like wood stained of pierced palms.
Like being judged.

I know what he meant now, how a man
carries his steps like stones to the grave.
How ears hear from far away – sounds
they know were there. How aftermath,
the silence and stillness, stay with you,
just like souvenirs.

Almost a Savior

Most of all I remember the weight, his
thudding footfall at night when he came home
from Bethlehem. His boots brought factory iron
with them. And the bronze bubbles of the smelt,
the ash on his whiskers, added dark gravity
to his face. A circle of white where a hardhat
protected mind and kept skin pure made him look
like his two-tone Chevy rotting in the yard.

Each evening, he reminded me that angels
could be heavy, that shaking floorboards
need not enhance terror. Night is scary enough
he said, without the ghosts of sound. Tremble
at the real, boy. Besides, devils don’t have beards
or halos. And they all drive Fords.

The Secrets of Skeletons

The closet is crowded with more
than clothes, stuffed with stilettos
and secrets. The spikes and flats
of yesterday’s storms and silence,

and ivory memories with marrow
of hollowed promises. They clank
in the calendar’s wind and echo
through the bedroom
when you swing the door wide.

Dress for the day, the doorknob
mutters. Drape yourself
in white, the almighty color
of whispering bones that hang

and jangle from hooks you hide
behind the lacquered wood
of dreams and days
that talk in your sleep
and walk on the water you weep.