PATTEN, Brian

---

Nationality: British. Born: Liverpool, Lancashire, 7 February 1946. Education: Sefton Park Secondary School, Liverpool. Career: Reporter, Bootle Times, and editor, Underdog, both Liverpool. Regents Lecturer, University of California, San Diego, 1985. Awards: Eric Gregory award, 1967; Arts Council grant, 1969; Mystery Writers of America special award, 1976; Writers award, Arts Council of England, 1998. Agent: Rogers Coleridge and White, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN, England.

Publications

Poetry

Portraits. Privately printed, 1962.

The Mersey Sound: Penguin Modern Poets 10, with Adrian Henri and Roger McGough. London, Penguin, 1967; revised edition, 1974,1983.

Little Johnny's Confession. London, Allen and Unwin, 1967; New York, Hill and Wang, 1968.

Atomic Adam. London, Fulham Gallery, 1967.

Notes to the Hurrying Man: Poems Winter '66-Summer '68. London, Allen and Unwin, and New York, Hill and Wang, 1969.

The Homecoming. London, Turret, 1969.

The Irrelevant Song. Frensham, Surrey, Sceptre Press, 1970.

Little Johnny's Foolish Invention (bilingual edition), translated by Robert Sanesi. Milan, M'Arte, 1970.

Walking Out: The Early Poems of Brian Patten. Leicester, Transican, 1970.

At Four O'Clock in the Morning. Frensham, Surrey, Sceptre Press, 1971.

The Irrelevant Song and Other Poems. London, Allen and Unwin, 1971; revised edition, 1975.

When You Wake Tomorrow. London, Turret, 1971.

And Sometimes It Happens. London, Steam Press, 1972.

The Eminent Professors and the Nature of Poetry as Enacted Out by Members of the Poetry Seminar One Rainy Evening. London, Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1972.

Double Image, with Michael Baldwin and John Fairfax. London, Longman, 1972.

The Unreliable Nightingale. London, Rota, 1973.

Vanishing Trick. London, Allen and Unwin, 1976.

Grave Gossip. London, Allen and Unwin, 1979.

Love Poems. London, Allen and Unwin, 1981.

New Volume, with Adrian Henri and Roger McGough. London, Penguin, 1983.

Storm Damage. London, Unwin Hyman, 1988.

Grinning Jack: Selected Poems. London, Unwin Hyman, 1990.

Armada. N.p., Flamingo Books, 1997.

Recordings: Selections from Little Johnny's Confession and Notes to the Hurrying Man and New Poems, Caedmon, 1969; Vanishing Trick, Tangent, 1976; The Sly Cormorant, Argo, 1977; Gifted Wreckage, with Roger McGough and Adrian Henri, Talking Tape, 1984; Jelly Pie, with Roger McGough, Puffin, 1987; Grizzelda Frizzle and Other Stories, 1994; Juggling with Gerbils, Penguin Audio Books, 2000.

Plays

The Pig and the Junkle (for children; produced Nottingham, 1975;London, 1977).

The Sly Cormorant (for children; produced London, 1977).

The Ghosts of Riddle Me Heights (for children; produced Birmingham, 1980).

Behind the Lines (revue), with Roger McGough (produced London, 1982).

The Mouthtrap, with Roger McGough (produced Edinburgh and London, 1982).

Gargling with Jelly, adaptation of his own poems (for children; produced Hull, 1988).

Radio Plays: The Hypnotic Island, 1977; Blind Love, 1983.

Television Plays (for children): The Man Who Hated Children, 1978; Mr. Moon's Last Case, from his own story, 1983; The Dying of the Light (documentary), 1998.

Other (for children)

The Elephant and the Flower: Almost-Fables. London, Allen and Unwin, 1970.

Jumping Mouse. London, Allen and Unwin, 1971.

Manchild. London, Covent Garden Press, 1973.

Two Stories. London, Covent Garden Press, 1973.

Mr. Moon's Last Case. London, Allen and Unwin, 1975; New York, Scribner, 1976.

Emma's Doll. London, Allen and Unwin, 1976.

The Sly Cormorant and the Fishes: New Adaptations into Poetry of the Aesop Fables. London, Kestrel, 1977.

Gargling with Jelly. London, Viking Kestrel, 1985.

Jimmy Tag-Along. London. Viking Kestrel, 1988.

Thawing Frozen Frogs. London, Viking, 1990.

Grizzelda Frizzle and Other Stories. London, Viking, 1992.

Impossible Parents. London, Walker Books, 1994.

The Utter Nutters. London, Viking, 1994.

Beowulf and the Monster. N.p., Scholastic, 1999.

The Blue and Green Ark. N.p., Scholastic, 1999.

Juggling with Gerbils. London, Puffin, 2000.

Editor, Gangsters, Ghosts, and Dragonflies: A Book of Story Poems. London, Allen and Unwin, 1981.

Editor, The Puffin Book of 20th Century Children's Verse. London, Viking, 1991; revised edition, 1999.

Other

Editor, with Pat Krett, The House That Jack Built: Poems for Shelter. London, Allen and Unwin, 1973.

Editor, Clare's Countryside: Natural History Poetry and Prose, by

John Clare. London, Heinemann, 1981.

*

Critical Studies: Interview with S. Balu Rao, in Indian Literature (New Delhi), 28(1), January-February 1985; "Brian Patten: Poesie" by Franco Nasi, in Verri (Bologna, Italy), 3–4, September-December 1995; Brian Patten by Linda Cookson, London, Northcote House, 1997; "A Gallery to Play To" by Phil Bowen, in The Story of the Liverpool Poets, Stride Publications, 1999.

*  *  *

A precociously gifted writer, Brian Patten won early fame in the 1960s, when still a teenager, as one of the three so-called Liverpool poets. The runaway success that came as a result of the live performance poetry read by himself, Roger McGough, and Adrian Henri, closely linked to the emergence of the pop scene headed by the Beatles and kindred groups, established him as part of a recognized "school." With hindsight it can now be seen that, while the "Liverpool poet" tag was a convenient identification at the time, Patten and his colleagues were three talented artists with their own individual styles who happened to be moving in the same direction. All have since emerged as significant voices on the poetic scene, and Patten himself has not lived in Liverpool for more than thirty years.

Outwardly the most serious of the Liverpool poets, Patten creates a body of work notable for its romanticism. Love figures prominently in his writing, with recurrent images of seduction and its aftermath—the sleep of sated lovers, cast-off dresses, the sadness of parting. Another feature, akin to the poets of an earlier age, is his fondness for quiet contemplation away from the hustle of urban life, moments of solitude in deserted woods or under the rain. His precocious ability is evident in his early poems, where Patten's youth is betrayed by the number of schoolboy reminiscences and parallels. "Little Johnny's Confession," for all its acid wit, suggests an author himself not long out of school, while the worldly assurance of "Party Piece" fails to convince entirely. In "Where Are You Now, Batman?" his lament for the heroes of a vanished childhood displays a real, and recent, nostalgia. These poems demonstrate the writer's potential and indicate the decisions he has already reached on the nature and purpose of his chosen form. "Interruption at the Opera House" and the more self-indulgent "Prosepoem toward a Definition of Itself" reveal his view of poetry as a natural and subversive act, at once a gift to the masses—"the rightful owners of the song"—and a rejection of the cultured elite who regard it as their property. Wary of critics, suspicious of intellectual analysis, Patten in "A Literary Gathering" tells of his unease among the dissectors and his relief when, once outside, he is free of "the need / To explain away any song."

A writer with a penchant for the hardness and clarity of the fairy tale, Patten has produced several books for children, one of them a retelling of Aesop's fables. Ironically, much of his adult poetry is less accessible than that of Henri or McGough. The style is dense and compact, with abrupt changes, short, intense lines, and potent images—"our love like a whale from its deepest ocean rises"—which sometimes threaten to overwhelm the rest of the poem. Rejecting the carefully packaged sentiments and elegant observations of conventional poetry, Patten demands a means of expression that reflects the harshness of reality: "I want to give you something / that bleeds as it leaves my hand / and enters yours, / something that by its rawness, / that by its bleeding / demands to be called real." Despite the frequent complexity of his utterances, he finds inspiration from the commonest sources. Patten hears celestial music as a girl sings in the bathroom, offers his beloved a blade of grass in lieu of a poem, even finds a small dragon in his woodshed. At his best he compels the reader's acceptance, piercing a thicket of sentences with rare and startling visions.

Storm Damage combines the familiar lyricism with a darker, reflective mood. Savaged by his own intense feelings, Patten hits out at superficiality in others. Literary critics, "God-freaks," media personalities, and trendy priests are dismissed with a venomous, scathing wit. In "Dead Thick" Patten ridicules the English teacher who does not read books—"I'm too busy for literature, that's the problem"—and later concocts his own amusing history of English lit from Chaucer to Ted Hughes. Distanced from friends whose rebellion has given way to suburban conformity, he ponders sadly on Adam's Fall and on the betrayal of 1960s idealism: "So much hoped for, so little altered." Yet in spite of his regrets, he still finds time in poems like "The Ambush" and "As She Goes Home This Evening" to celebrate the joy and pain of love.

With Armada Patten attempts to reassess and understand his past experiences. Inspired by the death of his mother, to whom the collection is dedicated, Armada gives poetic expression to thoughts and emotions hidden for many years. Patten revisits a traumatic childhood, his playground landscape of bomb sites and derelict buildings now long since vanished. In "The Betrayal" he laments this lost world and its inhabitants, which up to now he had failed to write about: "Now they have become the air I breathe, / Not to have marked their passing seems such a betrayal." "Stepfather" recalls his mother's brutal husband, who even in death is felt as a malevolent presence by the poet, while "Ghost Ship" finds Patten thinking of the sailor father he never knew. Central to the book is the image of his mother. The title poem calls back a memory of childhood, the boy Patten sailing his toy boats on a pond while his mother ("old at twenty-three, alone") watches impatiently, eager to be gone. Just as the boats are blown by the wind, so she is now "blown out of reach / by the smallest whisper of death." In "Ward Sixteen" Patten records her passing, and in "Cinders" he provides a bitter, poignant memorial to her bleak life: "You never went to a ball, ever / In all your years sweeping kitchens / No fairy godmother appeared, never. / / Life was never a fairy-tale / Cinders soon." Contemplating and transcending his past through his poems, Patten offers the healing power of love as a response, the positive message exemplified in "So Many Different Lengths of Time": "A man lives for as long as we carry him inside us / for as long as we carry the harvest of his dreams, / for as long as we ourselves live, / holding memories in common, a man lives." The most significant of Patten's collections to date, Armada is given detailed examination by Linda Cookson in her excellent critical study of the poet. With it Patten confirms his position as one of the leading poetic voices of our time.

—Geoff Sadler