High Tea at a Low Table: Stories from an Irish Childhood

Wind Ridge Books, 2013

Available for purchase at Phoenix Books, on Amazon and at independent bookshops everywhere.

Irish-born and Vermont-settled poet Angela Patten turns her lyrical skills to memoir. Her story is of a working-class girl growing up in horse-and-cart Dublin. Patten strives to find her own voice amid the insistent clamor of family and clergy and the lure of an unruly future.

In conjunction with the Burlington Irish Heritage Festival, Angela Patten, Dublin born poet and senior lecturer at the University of Vermont, visits with Margaret Harrington on the Channel 17 TV series FOCUS. Angela Patten reads selections from her three poetry collections, In Praise of Usefulness, Reliquaries, and Still Listening. She also reads from her prose memoir, High Tea at a Low Table: Stories from an Irish Childhood. Angela and Margaret talk about the Irish woman's voice in poetry and read selections from The White Page / An Bhileog Bhan: 20th Century Irish Women Poets.

Praise for High Tea at a Low Table

  • “I’ve had my sleep interrupted these last few evenings while I turn through the pages of High Tea, alternately laughing my head off and crying in sympathy with your family exploits of the fifties. Marvelous writing. You’ve done a great job. You invoke the world that has slipped away with our parents. Curiously, yours was so similar to the Irish Catholic world of my father that we were born into in Albany, not a hundred and fifty miles from here, but an ocean and generations away from Dublin. In the fifties in Albany that world of County Cork, Dublin and the rest of that island still throbbed with that sense of humor, story, pathos, guilt, judgment and all the rest that you describe with such animation, color and sound."

    Billy Drislane

  • Sprinkle ANGELA’S ASHES (not literally) with echoes of P. G. Wodehouse (“She has a tongue that would clip hedges”) and Bob Dylan (“In that intergenerational combat of the 1960s, religion was the usual battlefield”), and you have a pretty good image of HIGH TEA AT A LOW TABLE. This excellent autobiography of Angela Patten, a silver-tongued poet and professor at the University of Vermont, traces her journey from an upbringing within a poor but loving family in Ireland to her relocation to America, with its fearsome newness, its opportunities for success, and its dangers of sudden terrorizing crime. A captivating story beautifully told.

    Angela's Ashes Meets Bob Dylan, October 2, 2014 by Jim Defilippi 

Excerpt from

High Tea at a Low Table: Stories From An Irish Childhood

“The steel barrel caught the sunlight and shone like a jewel. What was I to do? This wasn’t a story I had read in a book. It was the real world cutting in, as if the radio of my thoughts had gone suddenly dead. The weapon created an immediate intimacy between us. There was something obscene about its sudden intrusion…

“It was far from guns and kidnappers I was reared, as my father might have said. I grew up during the 1950s and 60s in Sallynoggin, a working-class neighborhood about seven miles south of Dublin City. This was an era in which the ragman, the slopman and the coalman still came to our doorsteps with horses and carts, and Mr. Byrne, the milkman, arrived on his bicycle to ladle loose milk from a tilley-can.”