Nullaby

Nullaby explores psychodrama in the domestic space, clandestine realities of love, and fears and anxieties in a modern relationship; the reflections on which most often occur in liminal states between sleep and waking or as a result of being kept awake at night.

Blindness, and seeing, are inseparable in Patrick Wright’s Nullaby. Deeply personal in the way they record illness and care, the poems often emerge out of darkness: in 'The Blind Photographer', typically, he relishes the dense particularities of his speaker’s situation, even as he goes about 'invoking all that’s lost in the world / as blocks of visitation on contact paper.' – John McAuliffe

The sensual, anatomised poems of Nullaby travel through interior and external landscapes, 'the body’s catacombs', to track apparitions, hospital wards, the night terrors of illness. These places where 'the joke begins to wear itself thin' nevertheless brim with light,colour, scent. At once loss and redemption, its song of 'I' to 'you' is almost unbearably intimate and always extraordinary. In this heart-aching collection Wright is 'faithful all along' to lyrical form and its 'limitless repertoire of love'. – Gail Ashton

Full Sight of Her

Charting a steady encroachment of shadows over a relationship, Wright engages with the most profound subjects – love and loss, madness, grief, illness – and attends to them with a finely-wrought poetic sensibility, producing a soundscape of nervous, almost fractious energy. A play of light and shade runs throughout, with early joys tinged with doubts, moving into omens and prophecies, until fears can no longer be hidden in full daylight. Whether set against a backdrop of cheap and ruinous North-West landscapes, or domestic interiors seen through the lens of expressionist horror, Wright shows us that love and anticipated grief are inseparable, just as the shadow is from the lamp. 

'These are love poems at their most intense. Poems that celebrate the beloved as an artist with an alchemist’s imagination and bide closely to her through illness in such a deeply affecting way that as a reader, I felt her loss as a palpable ache.  The backdrop of this collection is seaside clutter and the impossible metaphysics of plastic chairs, beachside cafes and a dark sea that threatens at the edge of everything to drown even daffodil light with its shade.' – Helen Ivory

Exit Strategy

‘Beyond the argon and plexiglas I know of another cold room.’ Through a series of encounters with modernist artworks, the poems in Exit Strategy attempt to navigate a world fractured by grief after the death of a partner. Abstract, sometimes actively resistant, the artworks – like the universe itself – offer no easy consolations: ‘The sea has no reply – & I’m devastated’. Rather, they are partners in an ongoing conversation, the poems written not only ‘after’ but ‘alongside’ or ‘before’ the artworks, working with them to try to give sense and shape to loss: ‘I’m left stranded this side, tasked with redrawing the lines’.

Drawing on philosophy, physics and religious texts alongside modernist art, and experimenting with a range of innovative poetic forms, this collection is an intriguing exploration of our various ‘ways of seeing’, but it’s also one rooted deeply in experience of loss and love – ‘let’s proceed with tenderness’, the poet reminds us, or perhaps himself. End or beginning, the poet asks; the answer, of course, is neither and both: ‘If the universe is infinite, I just need to learn to travel far enough.’ – Helen Tookey