Please join us to celebrate the launch of Pattern-book by Éireann Lorsung.

The reading will be hosted by Jon McGregor. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing.

Jon McGregor writes: ‘In these wonderful, breath-stopping and heart-enlarging poems, Éireann Lorsung asks only that we pay close attention – to the text, to the world, to the way the world becomes note by note the text – while she pays close attention alongside us. These are poems conducted at ground level, at walking pace, attentive to the changing of the light, of the seasons, of the certainties we thought we were growing up with. Here are poems about the American Midwest, the English midlands, the low country of Flanders; about flax, fieldfares, rivers, fathers and brothers, lovers, fabrics, sewing, sowing, grammar, bicycles, umbrellas, rain and snow, fading light, damp houses, tea, gardens, glass jars, distance, language, breath, touch, and the strangeness of metaphor. These are poems to attend to, return to, and share with the community of readers who either already adore Éireann Lorsung’s work or are about to discover it.’

Threaded through with filaments of others’ poems – from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks – Pattern-book’s sonnets, couplets, quatrains and invented forms draw on family life, art history, grief, time and the natural world. Woven of recurring images, Lorsung’s delight in form brings pattern to vivid life.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

portrait of Lorsung in a dark shirt with dark hair and dark round glassesÉireann Lorsung was born and grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She works and teaches in a field of images, objects, movement and texts. Her collections include Music for Landing Planes By, Her book, and The Century (Milkweed Editions). She moved to Ireland in 2022 to teach writing at University College Dublin.

Jon McGregor is the author of four novels and two story collections. He is the winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, and has been long–listed three times for the Man Booker Prize, most recently in 2017 for Reservoir 13. He is professor of creative writing at the University of Nottingham, England, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters.