My name is Barry Patterson, I'm a writer & performer living in Coventry, in the United Kingdom. I work in places like schools & museums a lot but also in the great outdoors & on the net.

Why Red Sandstone Hill? One of the themes which runs through much of my work is that of our relationship with the Land through the special places in which we find ourselves: the places where we live, work & celebrate, so my URL honours the nature of the place where I live.

Brook

Fair things pass by, unheeded as the threshold brook – Keats


You called to me at the time of bud-break
Rain joy was alive in the hedgerows
Our crow colony were gathered on the grass
Tight, spherical flocks of starlings
Wheeling in to join with the carnival.

You called to me from Nifl-mouths
Where underworld caverns & channels sick out grey water
Veiled by your flimsy film, skin gleaming
Emerge awoken to light life
& no-one to hold you & love you & kiss you but concrete walls

When our eyes met, my beautiful one
I knew you & as I knew you, I loved you
& as I loved you I tried to follow you over the land
Walk-weaving in a loom shuttle track
Watching for you at every steel-barred crossing

My dear! We were often destined to part
As we wove our way across suburbia, so
I must seek you at every obscure road bend's railing bridge
& meet we must again at last
Beneath arden's yet untaken oaks

Thus we became company for one another
On a wet spring day; set out from the
Willow,oak & thorn-walking common
To tread road-ridden earth of secret story
Who remembers a time before they built walls

From the common's drains to Canley Ford
Some would call you a dirty ditch
A man-made channel drain bitch
But you have a life force & a destiny
& somewhere out there your waters enter the great river

Once you were a poor, nameless little slime stream
Your sluice notch,  steel carved into the edge of the common;
Iron grilled to bleed drain the watershed
& grease from fairground screaming neon
Your voice just audible under sounds of machines

But now you are mine, my sweetheart, my stream
& I have traced you from the air on my wings
& I have smelled you,
peered into the gloom of your chamber
& offered you my heart

There's a sense of purpose about you, my darling
Descend emerging from your ivy curtain arches
From underground to over ground; to weave
A track which defies the grids men made
Makes an end to the hard lines that herd us

Beyond the Farmhouse Inn with its two foot bridges
You turn suddenly, disappear
Into robin haunted brambles,
As you approach the railway& its bridge
You slip gracefully beneath

Somewhere beyond the neat rows of allotment sheds & boxes
You sought the freedom fortune of the in-between
I find you by a back garden road way
each gate with its own slippery rain-wet footbridge;
a truly threshold brook, I pray they heed you.

Freed from the tubes of convenience drain
Walled by unmortared brick & local stone
Over hung by sycamore, hazel & elder
You make another turn, cutting into clay
You made your mark, you are getting stronger

An enormous willow pollard memory
Of  country lane bird song, pre-dates the
Nightingale bungalows with their labrador lawn lands
These are your country now
Fletchamstead Highway, perpetual motion rumble, last gasp.

The Riddings, Godiva Guns, locked down
Red sandstone bridge, Canley Road, Canley Brook
Soon you'll meet this sister; we'll meet again soon too,
You squeeze through a narrow culvert
Corrugated iron & concrete, last dash out from the barrel, boom.

Beyond the pale,  by dark, steel privilege
I can see you playfully loop-wriggle a path
Between so-called greens
But the privacy elysium of the pointless game
Is the last barrier before our rendez-vous in the woods.

We met behind the Milk Bar
On the friends' Millenium green, you had joined your sister
Rose bushes & steps down to a pool where the kids once swam
Blackthorn foaming at the edge
As you emerge from the thicket

Canley Ford with its gushing voice
Resinous spicy smell of water rushing
It's a crossroads of  ripple patterns
Bird song April-shower rejoicing
What a pair you make!

How strong you are together,
Tearing stones from the bank
Cutting your own path through the fields
Set free into open land to follow your bliss waters
All the way to Avon, Severn & Great Mother Sea.

& to some you're just a nameless trickle
A drainage ditch from an industrial estate
Spiced by the sweat sheen of the leisure centre,
A transport system for discarded plastic odours
But I know you're an ancient wise & beautiful being

So I pledge myself to you, my dear
Sweet waters of the heart land of England
Who knows green glory
& for all the world, that they might now know,
I name you: Hearsall Brook

Stream that runs by the high hall at the corner of the heath.

Barry Patterson April  2012

28th March,  2012

The Fireplace of Inspiration

The first part of my reading at the Fizz, Polesworth Abbey, March 27th 2012. Poets stand in front of the fireplace where Drayton, Donne and Johnson once sat & maybe read their works.

Update, 3rd April

Malcom Dewhirst, poetry activist  & the lead instigator of The Fizz & The Polesworth Poetry Trail has put up a lovely review of the evening on his blog Polysworda:

"Tuesday saw The FIZZ with our guest poet Barry Patterson. The evening started in the light and as the dusk descended, the people from Polesworth and beyond settled into a very special evening of poetry.

Read more on the page....Barry mixed in beats from his bodhran, building a tempo that entranced the audience into a calm vision of the natural world. Added to this were tunes from a bone flute that stirred the atmosphere to shift into a comfort that hung on his every word. It was a wonderful set from this much acclaimed poet and performer.

I would like to thank Barry for his performance and for bringing a new calmness to Polesworth on the night that made for an atmosphere that allowed all the other poetry shine."

There is also information about my poem on the poetry trail. More about that soon. Mal's blog is a great place to find out what's going on in our local poetry scene & his "Lost Poets" feature is becoming legendary, now featured on Radio Wildfire.

Interview on Druidcast, the Druid Podcast

Find out how mad I really am!

I was interviewed by Paul Newman with some poems, philosophy & laughter. Damh the Bard is your host on the podcast & he plays some great music.

Druidcast No. 60, brought to you by The Order of Bards Ovates & Druids. Click on the icon to go there.

A Bardic Celebratory

in honour of the many tribes of our land
& the Druid tribe, my Pagan Sangha

& gone to green, the pride of the Angles
Where the hawk stoops, shore thunders
Where the hare sleeps, hidden shield
Force field of mountain lights
River brightness, sleek of migrant trout.
 
& gone to glory, the pride of the Cymry
Where green & gold slumber in the pool
Where the sun dreams of forests that no-one knows
Mysteries of the hillside
Stone voices of the unborn, unseen ancestor.
 
& gone to Mount Pleasant, the song of the Gaels
Where the bee makes her nest within the tree
Where horses sleep upon the island of wind
Woven of voices bitten by time & night
To be eaten, to be drunk to the fill.
 
& gone to green, the pride of the Britons
Where sweet awakening of bird song breaks fast
Where rain makes circles upon my river tongue
Speaks of ageless delights of earthing
By the wood's edge, in Albion.
 
12-12-11 BP

Last Saturday, at their Winter Assembly In Glastonbury Town Hall The Order of Bards Ovates and Druids crowned me as an Honorary Bard of the order. I am truly grateful to Philip Carr-Gomm & all the OBOD tribe for this honour, which is both humbling and inspiring.

The Wanton Green

I have three poems in The Wanton Green  which is now out and may be purchased from Mandrake Books

Editor Gordon, Creeping Toad McClellan says:

"The Wanton Green is an exciting book, due for publication in the autumn of 2011. Gathering essays from 20, mostly British, pagans about their relationships with the world around them, The Wanton Green will offer a different perspective on western technological approaches to the Earth...

As our relationship with the world unravels and needs to take new form, or maybe to reconnect with an older pattern, The Wanton Green will present a collection of inspiring provoking and engaging essays by modern pagans talking about their own deep, passionate and wanton relationships with the earth."

To read more, visit the Wanton Green Blogspot by clicking on the link at the beginning of this paragraph. I just got my copy and am enjoying it very much indeed; some brilliant writing in there.

Other news

My Poem Advice to a Geordie Miner Lad in Pooley along with some excellent work by other local poets has been accepted for the second phase of the Polesworth Poets Trail. More information here.

My poetry collection, Nature Mystic, published by Heaven Tree Press is back in print in a new second edition.

Click on the picture link to find out more & order a copy online.

Price £4.52 including postage & packing.

The Astronaut

The astronaut's grandfather worked the land with horses & taught the boy to keep his feet on the ground & to work hard
He was just a homesteader on the plains of Wisconsin but he paid for the kid to go to school:
Al became an engineer, a pilot, a poet & he flew all the way to the moon
Which is still hard for many people to believe & difficult for most of us to imagine:
"So much for keeping your feet upon the ground, boy!" the old man might have said,
As he tightened a jingling leather harness, such good design that it had hardly changed since the age of chariots.
& the astronaut sat in the lonely capsule, & he took one of those glorious photos of the rising earth
Not full or waning gibbous but an awesome crescent, incandescent with clouded life
Nothing like the sky-sickle we know, but fully charged with life force, precisely huge, sharp beyond belief
& it caught his breath remembering that in there some farm boy was riding his horse over the grassy plain,
Thinking about his girlfriend, about what he had for dinner yesterday, wondering what to do with his life;
That this amulet which he had just touched with his finger-lens was a peopled world, her cities roaring with life-colour,
Forests singing green chaos; river deltas teeming with abundance flow, snow-mountains, prairies & the sea
Even something as vast as the sea, was just the fizzing rind of this blue-white cosmic berry.

Later, as they spun into strange trajectories upon their carefully measured angle of departure,
He pushed himself free from the hatch & floated into interplanetary space, the first man ever to swim so far from home
Witness: the Earth & Moon in the same field of vision, bathed in starlight so intense that you could hardly see
& this was an important moment in the living history of the Universe becoming aware of itself
Which you may choose to doubt, but it seems as if there is a certain inevitability to it, whether or not we survive
& it happens every time a little kid turns over a stone to witness new life-forms, or finds their first fossil;
Spots an eclipse that no-one else on the school bus had noticed,Drayton, Donne and Johnson once sat & maybe read their works. discovers that Saturn's rings are real,
Or sits, glued to the television for the latest message, the latest image  from the Other World,
The Ancient Outer World of vastness, the thundering extreme of temperature & terror that is our home.
& that brings me into the picture, that's me there, see? I'm in that photograph
& so are you & you & you, we all are, spinning vectors on the fibonacci spiral of deja vu & again & again & again
Yes, there we are, the people of the awesome Scythe Blade Earth, tiny but not insignificant.



This poem was written on the occasion of the anniversary of the first lunar landing & inspired by an interview with Apollo 15 pilot Al Worden on Boing Boing. He took this photo.

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