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Short Stories : Suburban Lives is beginning to be reviewed.

Here is the latest to come my way :

ENVOI ISSUE 141 Reviewer : Will Daunt

Patrick B. Osada's second collection is the immensely confident work of a writer who combines accessibility with a fine appreciation of an enormous range of forms. Here's a very English voice which falls as easily into assured rhythms & rhymes, as it does into freer and exploratory verse. The collection has a chirpy introduction, but the graffiti on the back cover proves a better taster :

Children and poems/Make them strong, make them honest/ Let them stand alone.

It's a bold credo and a telling reflection of the 110 pages of poems which encapsulate many lives...There is some autobiography, but Osada never quite lets us know how much. With compelling economy, Icon humanizes a billboard poster :

A face like yours could even sell a truss...

As fashion icon you work hard, it's true -

But as a son we see a different you.

A much longer poem, The Tree, explores the epithet of the book's cover in a Heaney-like memory of childhood. "Impossible to climb," the willow tree, when scaled by the persona, takes on an obvious but effective sybolism :

When it comes down to it, you're on your own.

Osada converts this principle into an humane, rather than misanthropic quest, filling the book with many characters who are strong in their individuality. In Gleam, for example, the search for suburban paradise is embodied by the obsessive personality of one who has jettisoned family, in favour of a brittle, illusory Utopia :

Colours heightened , luminous, bright.

Each flower faultlessly maintained.

Living things seem sparkling but lifeless, and the moral is predictable, but adeptly delivered:

He's on his own and he is left

Sans ambition - only regrets.

The title poem fractures such suburban inanities further, portraying a couple who are "behind high fences working on a dream" : industrious yet isolated; purposeful yet apart. The husband wants for nothing but happiness, lives for that dream, but is robbed of both :

Died this last weekend in a bloody smash....

(A pond half dug and walls to raise between).

Of his wife : ..".will she feel her life here's at an end?" There's a sharp paradox in the implied response to the question : his death is her escape route from monotonous materialism. Osada includes some grim subject matter in his intricate suburban panorama, and he does

so with aplomb. Fatalistically The Consultation leads its terminally -ill protagonist to a selfless concern for her husband :

More disturbing is No.27 , a bleak tale of familial arson, or The Mission , a deadpan description of a serial killer's habits. This is more effective because of its deployment of rhyme, which in the wrong hands might turn the macabre into melodrama. Here it simply aids characterization :

Taking on the flat, the clincher

Was the bathroom's glass and tiles,

It was perfect for his mission :

Easy clean this domicile.

Even in this bleakness, there is a kind of black humour, and much lighter themes are found elsewhere. Vernon's Equinox tells of a "dossers" chaotic football game in a park, while My Ugly Sister (presumably written for children) humorously shows the more trying

side of many children's characters.

Short Stories : Suburban Lives impresses with its length and diversity, and Osada, in returning to the village setting of Edward Thomas's famous poem, uses familiar form in a new way : in Adlestrop he recovers something unexpected in the vastly changed, yet

still evocative place :

Still no one left and no one came that way

So I drove on as skies grew mistier

Through rains of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Adlestrop Again

In this apparently desultory imagery and rhyme, breathes an intrepid and important new English voice.

"Anyone opening Patrick B. Osada's book in the expectation of reading short stories in prose is in for a surprise. They are in verse, stories in very good verse. The suburban poems cover a wide stretch of people and places. Osada finds plenty of both humour and sadness in suburbia , but he also shows plenty of understanding. The collection opens with a gem, describing a village swamped by development and ..' made obsolete/ by an all consuming modern world.' And, oh yes, it rhymes. Osada knows how to use rhyme , not only in this poem, but elsewhere, as something to force home his points; he's in charge of it and it's not in charge of him.

The collection does move out of the suburbs and, in a number of poems, Osada.. is drawing from his experience as a social worker. They are all marked with the same understanding as the suburbia poems. Perhaps my favourite is one that draws from neither suburbia or the social services : in 'Adlestrop Again' Osada echoes the original poem of Edward Thomas and at the same time adds his own contemporary touches.

The book cover shows the author standing before a wall with the words 'Children and poems - make them strong, make them honest'. I trust that he achieved this as a Headteacher; he certainly does as a maker of poems. He has been widely published and, in his Dedication, expresses gratitude to the editors and publishers who have encouraged him. So do I. "

W.H.Petty, "Compassionate Poets" - a review for ORBIS magazine.

Others have written :

...."a sideways look at life, brilliantly expressed" Ronnie Goodyer, Poetry Editor, REACH magazine.

"I've not read anything quite like these poems...a very contemporary, demotic voice.." Leslie Norris

"Yes, the poems have grit and also the poet's instinctive inner eye for the beauty of emotional reaction.." Martin Holroyd, Editor, POETRY MONTHLY

"My first impression of this new collection from Bluechrome was "plenty of truth but little beauty", to paraphrase John Keats.

But this was no criticism of a brave and challenging book that is planted so firmly in a contemporary landscape.

Osada is a fine social observer, even if like most of us he is sometimes lost for answers when faced with suburban and community decay. Often grim humour is Osada's response...

Osada, though, can be a very English poet.

This is most evident in his command of flowing, lyrical cadences when he looks to the traditional rural landscape not, surely, for answers, but to escape from overburdening reality; the weight of the modern....

I strongly recommend this book."

Garry Bills, Book Review, REACH Magazine.