Still Listening

Salmon Poetry, 1999

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Praise for Still Listening

  • “The poems in Still Listening depend on memory and dreams as their inexhaustible source. They describe a sense of living between two worlds - the romantic America of childhood and the folklore of the remembered Irish past. Angela Patten's poems illustrate the notion that making poetry is the process of making the familiar strange, of drawing attention to a wisdom and humor that is intrinsic to everyday Irish speech. The poems in Still Listening come directly out of an oral tradition in which family troubles are turned into familiar stories that can be retold and relished again and again. It is these stories and their peculiarly Irish turns of phrase that lend a characteristic music and texture to the poems.”

    –Samantha Hunt, Seven Days, Burlington, VT, September 22, 1999

  • “Patten explores the disorientation of living an ocean away from her family of origin. The sounds of language in America, even though the words are English, are foreign. …Like the tide, Patten goes back over and over, pulled in her poetry to keep touching the shore she left… "Still Listening" is a double string of singing poems. It gives off a most pleasing sound, the kind that deepens with re-reading.”

    –Francette Cerulli, The Times Argus, Vermont, February 18, 2000

  • “… It is invariably the mark of a good storyteller that she or he is first a good listener: Patten is definitely such a poet, and her collection is aptly titled. Her ear records not only the verbatim sense of her speakers, but the patterns, inflections, and nuances of their speech as well. Her poems are, foremost, narrative works in the melodic Irish oral tradition, works meant to be listened to as well as read…What a pleasure it is to pick up a volume that one can enjoy thoroughly, from the simple, evocative cover art to the last line of the final poem.”

    –Kirkus Review

A poem from Still Listening

Saying Goodbye

On Sunday my parents drive me out to the country
for the peace and quiet. But my father brings
a radio for the football results.
The announcer's tinny voice barks out the score
while my mother's chatter rises and falls like a wave.

‘You’re much better off over there,’
she says, just to have something to say.
‘There’s no opportunity for the young people in Ireland.’
It seems my letters from Vermont worked.
I knew they were the perfect snow-job.

Still, thinking of my life that moves without them,
I am stricken by distances and silence.
We are each in our separateness connected.
I wear his eyes, her mouth, the family nose.
But I'm strangely grown up and out of reach.

On Monday they take me back to the airport.
‘I'm a foolish old woman,’ my mother weeps
as my father shepherds her safely away.
She's been pushing me away with her tongue
all week and now I can do nothing to save her.

I walk down the ramp, feeling myself
growing smaller with each descending footstep,
then turn to call back to them over the whining engines.
Her head is bent, his arm around her shoulders.
All that’s left is to lug my portion of regrets
like an extra suitcase out over the Atlantic.