Emerson suggests that “genius is the activity that repairs the decay of things.” Such genius is at work in Jeremy Pataky’s debut, Overwinter. Easy to forget that the effort of utmost attention is itself a mystical practice—as if to name all that in the world can be named might restore to truest existence. But the honest poet knows that the repair of the world also requires the brute work of recognizing also those forces of erosion, some necessary, some less so. Pataky is just such an honest poet, thank goodness, for all of us who dwelling in the world also want it to be real, and in whose poems we find an opportunity to become more real ourselves. Such hope requires that we see not only “Today a green inchworm, inching” and the bee that “pollinates the fireweed’s top blossom,” but also fighter jets, also neck ties, also phone calls. To name the world back into presence also opens up those forms of loss no such naming can wholly amend, and so, entwined with the precision of the geographic eye is the painful accuracy of the missing beloved—heart’s wound, soul’s ragged edge that stymies the mind’s power to call back what has gone missing. Such realities give us a book that makes of the heart’s affections a myriad world, where presence and absence intertwine, and the poet is no more than faithful recorder of difficulty and wonder.
—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Circle's Apprentice; This Nest, Swift Passerine; Mulberry; and A Whaler's Dictionary