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.

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, 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.

Ewe-Mam

She bore two lambs at Losar in the lea of the hawthorn hedge
Frail scraps of warmth come forth into the windy cold winter's night
Swathes of heavy mist, not quite come to rain turned grey in the first light
They took refuge in her body heat, found her breasts & began to awaken.

Her huge, hot musky fleece tangle was their tent against cold morning
The ewe-mam alert for threat from fast shadows with burning eyes
Her head proud raised to the new day, new year, new life's veiled sunrise
Dilated nostrils tasting hillside, birth blood, north east wind, wakening earth.

Daylight warmth, weak as her new young, grew bright beyond the valley
That their small eyes could not yet see, great world beyond the known hill
Beyond mother heat, shaggy dome of love strength from which they fed their fill
Innocent, unwary, tentative new-borns yet to land,  take their first step here.

Man emerges from behind a wall, but they do not yet know of strange creature man
Neither can they sense the circling talon-swallow on its dark red wings of air
But these unseen eminences will test the mettle of new young lambs out there
She stands & they see the whole world move over & discover that they too, have legs.

Man is gone from sight, away up the hill, unpredictable man, strange friend man
But the stillness of the birth trance has passed over, now waking life begins
She leads them around the curve of the hill, on shaky steps as the morning mist thins
& a vast, bright sky of racing clouds unfolds itself over their little woolly heads.

Beams & rays of sun flash down between the children who blink their eyes
In wonder, turn their heads toward the great shadow that is heat, hope & breakfast
She stops & turns; man is sitting by a small tree close to the crest, staying still
He sings to them, making a strange, melodic, reassuring cry; she turns & leads her lambs away.

Friend man is an eccentric creature, both caring & cruel, her hot breath tells them
Dogs run with him, many fear him, he rides upon a roaring, stinking wheel
But like you my dears, he has a hairy head, his heart pulses heat, his strength we feel
Just as you feel mine, stay by me number one, he cares for us in his own strange way.

The man beneath the hawthorn contemplates innocence; at dawn each day his heart is born anew
Unseen beneath the hedge coverlet of thorns, suckled upon wisdom's breast
In hillside morning, misted valley, mam-ewe, her lambs, bird wing & all the rest
He feels the elements' revelation, the play of light, delight of breath & he sings.


 © BP Losar 2011

All my work on these pages is copyright. You may not copy any part of this site or do any other act in relation to any part of this site that is prohibited by copyright other than the following:

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