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ROUGH MUSIC the new poetry collection by Patrick B. Osada
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Reviews of Rough Music have started to appear :
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New Hope International Review : James Roderick Burns
"This collection shows great strength of feeling and achievement... ROUGH MUSIC has a substantial core of finely crafted poems which will stand the test of time..."
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SOUTH poetry magazine No. 36, Review : Adam Hansen
This stimulating collection is divided into two sections: The Warfield Poems and Other Places, Other Faces. The latter's poignant intimations of 'Larkin's demon death' has Easter Moon as a particular highlight. As Osada's prefaces indicate, the former section localises such concerns, examining mutability in his Berkshire home. The opening poem rewrites Edward Thomas's As the Team's Head-Brass, describing alienated farmers, 'cocooned from larks', eager to sell up. It seems odd to use Thomas to lament a world we're losing (he knew it was lost), but Osada's countryside is realistically adversative, domesticated, replete with ironies. Incomers extend old houses, 'But shout' about urban creep, while dog-walking down horsemen's lanes. Hopefully the irony extends to Osada's personae, who, like Heaney's in Digging, 'sit above it all'. Later poems develop this heiratic detachment describing poetry as 'a calling.../Taking me from the others'. This pose partially excuses how some of the poems deride hapless or licentious 'townies' (in A Walk in the Country or Tonight's the Night) or resort to Romantic reverie idealising a 'green past'. Given the conflicts Osada describes, are such strategies reliable? Arguably not: one poem notes 'Trees are best dressed without man's help'.
Shifts in perspective undercut possible solipsism: 'A robin stopped to sing for me/And all the robin world.' An apple only appears perfect by 'magical deception'. These shifts identify who else has due reverence for Warfield, like the otherwise 'unseen' stranger praying to the east at dawn. But Osada presents some unsettling constructions. Is the vitally 'Fluorescent willow' in 'When does winter turn to spring?' of the same synthetic colour as the 'Florescent acid yellow flames' of rape-seed in Green and Pleasant, 'An alien crop' that 'burns England's heart'? Even overlooking how Osada essentializes national and rural identities here, this disrupts distinctions between urban and rural spaces, or industrial and agricultural lives, that he seems elsewhere to sustain. Perhaps this is deliberate: as both Virgil and Raymond Williams knew, the country is always conditioned by the city. With such unsettlements, like Christopher Hart's fine 1999 novel The Harvest, Rough Music offers timely ruminations on the condition of rural England.
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"Home is at the heart of Patrick B. Osada's Rough Music. The first half of the book is dedicated to Warfield, the poet’s home and a semi rural haven in an increasingly suburbanised part of Berkshire. It is written to celebrate a way of life under threat from rising populations and the need for more and more housing and also to signal what is being lost. Moments of time, skilfully observed and written in lucid, rhythmic verse dominate this first section, "The Warfield Poems.”
So blackthorn and gorse are seen as 'billows of the softest foam' (Berkshire Spring). Swallows come 'Wheeling over the bay/ Bringing African / Blue to replace the grey; / they are towing the sun / Home across the spray' (Magicians) while crows 'prelude celebration of first light... / These shadows caw across the stubbled field:' (Crows).
In the second half ('Other Places, Other Voices'), the same accessible style prevails, often with the same touch of poignancy for what passes. So in 'Motorway Epiphany', 'Today the scent of burning pine/ Wafts slowly over carriageways, / Smoke, like a veil across the trees, / marks passing of this Christmas time.' Similarly, 'Easter retains remembered suffering: / always a time for faith - when love hurts,' (Easter Moon).
Osada is a poet able to work with emotion, a poet who can take small events and small places, observe them precisely and elucidate them with a deft touch to reveal our shared humanity and the moments of connection."
Jan Fortune-Wood, Coffee House Poetry
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"Patrick Osada lives just beyond the eastern fringe of Hardy’s Wessex, where it moves towards Edward Thomas territory, and he is heir to their tradition of poetry writing. Like Hardy, he celebrates a vanishing rural heritage. Like Thomas, he employs rhymed quatrains and straight-forward language to capture the fields, creatures, people and moods evoked by this corner of Berkshire, though there is rarely that brooding undertone found in his forebears. While these are not pretty poems, they are gentle reflective ones. Patrick can produce some stunning images :
“Now, in cold brightness, trees look sad :/Cable-bound, wreathed with dead-eyed lamps,/They wait, impatient for the night.”
Or this :
“So sallow willow sends its seeds/To ride the air like thistledownUntil a longed-for shower of rain/Brings sweet relief and damps it down.”
“Sweet relief” is the sort of phrase the Romantic in Patrick slips into over- readily at times, but the observation, and the control of form, more than compensate for this.
There is a more varied range of subject later in the collection when the poet considers the older generation – collecting pensions, remembering old craftsmen, - There’s even an elegy for Princess Margaret.
A more strident note appears when Patrick bewails the creeping suburbanisation:
“Crushed cans and wrappers coat the verge./Daffodils struggle to be seen./
‘Smokers die young’ the packet says :/But better if it read ‘Stay Green’.”
Nothing showy here, but note the skill in “coat”, and the effective personification of the daffodils, giving way to the cunning introduction of modern media. This is a poet’s poet as well as one appealing to a wide readership. Patrick has a fine ear for cadences, and if he slips into the lyrical mode a bit too often, it is welcome to find him get right out of this vein with “The Knack.”
Unless you are an unrepentant urbanite, or as hostile to Nature poetry as someone like Peter Reading, you will not find many better poets fulfilling the role of John Clare for the 21st century than Patrick Osada. And a lovely book to look at and hold."
DAVID ASHBEE, REACH MAGAZINE
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