Review of "Changes" by Patrick Osada - D A Prince

Patrick Osada — Changes. 
​Dempsey & Windle, 2017. 72 pp. £7.99  ISBN 978-1-907435-36-2

The final poem is often the best way into a collection and Changes supports this view. The first stanza of ‘Anniversary’ runs “Uncertain that my memory serves me well—/ my nose pressed to the window of the past/ for images that flicker like old film/ with action blurred and features lost to chance.”. This brings together Osada’s approach to his themes throughout Changes’ three sections— Seasonal, At a Time of Unrest, and Keepsake — together with his preferred use of regular metrical form, often rhymed. Here the half rhyme (past/chance) has a pleasing lightness of touch, avoiding the heaviness that can sometimes come with full rhyme.

Osada’s presentation of the calendar year through plants and weather is both immediate and also layered in memory and questions: on seeing a fox at mid-day ‘… we all rubbed our eyes at what we’d seen.’ In ‘Last Reunion’ the geese whose annual visit marked the year leave, only to be replaced - ‘… men came with plans:/ Theodolites cast shadows over land.’. The then/now continuum/contrast is a unifying feature — childhood memories confronted by present-day reality. In ‘Shards’ Osada shows us men, working by hand, fitting a plate glass window into a local store, and then the modern version: machines, vacuum suction cups, and glazing that seals life inside city tower blocks. This layering of time works particularly well in ‘Monuments’, - ‘Immortalized in bronze, he’s caught mid-fight,/ rushing to catch the Hull to London train/ as if it were that Saturday in May/ when what he saw and wrote secured his fame.’ No need to name the poet or the writing here; Osada trusts his readers.
This collection answers its own question: ‘How do we keep alive what once we were?’ (from ‘Lost Boy’). Attention to changes and the continuing work of transforming these into words hold everything together.

D A Prince (SOUTH Magazine No 56)