Patrick Pritchett: Brief Mercy of This Life

Poetry as a valedictory flare – written in a ghost-language, addressed to the ghosts – those who are always with us, who walk where we walk, who dwell in the whisper world, who keep us close, who bestow small, secret mercies. The shadows of the lost ones, the secret society of luminous nullity; they spell the other names for loss, for care, for nowness. Not emptiness but initiation into a new form of fullness. Kenosis as plenitude. The work of mourning that keeps alive a sliver of melancholy, a connection with the absent, the gone.

“How is it far, if you think of it?”

On Sunderland 

Patrick Pritchett has been writing very good poems for a very long time. Sunderland, his latest, soars beyond everything he has written before … [he] is a necessary and masterful poet.

    Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno

Like Four Quartets, the poems of Sunderland conduct a tireless interrogation of words themselves—words as the thingness of this world—in a forlorn but strangely sustaining quest for the Word.

    Donald Revell

On Refrain Series

Pritchett builds the house of the poem from the “supernal longing” for love, both erotic and divine, and from the emptiness and futility of prayer, acknowledging that “nothing alone / will save us in the end.”

    Norman Finkelstein

On SONG X

Pritchett’s poetry approaches a pure lyricism unmatched in English poetry since Swinburne … [he] distills emotional resonances to an almost purely visionary experience — in other words, poetry as secular religion.

    Eric Hoffman