Christopher Patton

Christopher Patton is a Canadian poet and translator. A section from his first book, Ox, won the Paris Review’s long poem prize. Recent books include Curious Masonry and Unlikeness is Us, a volume of translations from Old English which won an American Book Award. His visual poetry has been shown at the Whatcom Museum and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. He blogs at theartofcompost.com.



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Unlikeness Is Us: Fourteen from the Exeter Book
Christopher Patton

2018 / Poetry/Medieval, Literary Criticism / $29.95
9781554471751 / Trade paper / 208 pp


Unlikeness Is Us offers fourteen new translations of Old English poems from the tenth-century Exeter Book. Some are well known, like “The Seafarer” and “The Ruin.” One, “Maxims I,” has rarely appeared whole, and what few published translations exist ignore small, crucial elements in the source, obscuring the deft shape of its thought-in-action. Christopher Patton’s translations, which draw the alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse into a richly patterned four-beat line, emphasize the concrete, tangible being of the poems as they are bedded on the manuscript page—scribal errors, fire damage, irreducible ambiguities—over the otherworldly values they sometimes espouse. With a critical introduction, commentaries, and extensive notes, this edition is equipped to serve students, scholars, and poetry readers alike.



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Other Books by this Author

Fast-Vanishing Speech
Christopher Patton, Klara du Plessis, Lisa Fishman, Jim Johnstone

2024 / Literary Criticism Canadian Poetry / $19.95 CAN
9781554472727 / Trade paper / 48 pp
Slipsheets: An incidental printing of Gerald Manley Hopkin’s “Pied Beauty”
Andrew Steeves, Christopher Patton

2023 / Poetry, Typography / $19.95 CAN
9781554472482 / Trade paper / 48 pp
Dumuzi
Christopher Patton

2020 / Canadian Poetry / $21.95 CAN
9781554472116 / Trade paper / 96 pp
Curious Masonry
Christopher Patton

2011 / Poetry / $15.95 CAN
9781554470938 / Trade paper / 48 pp

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