Quality Control at the Miracle Factory, the fourth full-length collection of poems by Irish poet Patrick Cotter, reflects the dark times of its writing, moving with unease through the world. Injustice and brutality are faced unflinchingly while the miracle of survival and endurance is credited and marvelled at, wherever it might occur.
“One of the more satisfying aspects of Sonic White Poise is in the formal control exerted by Cotter throughout. Some of these poems, in their discursive manner, reminded me of the best of Ciaran Carson’s work, the longer-than-usual lines, the thought process that is followed wherever it may go. … The language does the work and the poems are intelligent and captivating, and deserve, require, and reward close reading.”
—Richard Hayes, Poetry Ireland Review“Patrick Cotter is a poet capable of being both playful and serious to excellent effect. He has a gift for creating a rueful narrative voice that milks both sympathy and laughs from the reader. The writing is always finely crafted; it is conversational but learned, seemingly effortless, and is studded everywhere with the poet’s vast and unusual vocabulary. He is a modern poet in the best sense of that word and he deserves many, many readers.”
—Nuala O’Connor, Poetry International (San Diego)
DOLL MAKER
I have composed a bespoke voicebox, inserted not
in her throat but in a cavity where a heart might verb
and reverb. Provoked by tilt, it chants a wail, its timbre
uncanny like the tolls of the local belfry, kindred enough
in song to stir a far-flung emigrant to weep in memory.
Once, a collapsed shelf loaded with such implanted chests
unleashed a squalling chorus of lament in my graveyard-
quiet workshop. She is delft-headed, as if a teapot
had grown a face and shrunk its spout to a pert
bivalve sneeze-vent. She is a whelp of my imagination
and manufacture, fingerling of my wistful musings
and whittlings. Her irises are shaved, green marble
of Connemara. Her hair I’ve weaved from the seed-
wisps of wild clematis. I have made her for a granddaughter
slumbering in a distant timezone. The future for her
is a different country demanding allegiance to the polythene brats
of mass production, to bawl in a different accent, to know
nothing of the keening century her seanaithir first inhaled.
Quality Control at the Miracle Factory
Patrick Cotter
140 x 216 mm, 100 pp
ISBN 978-1-915629-40-1 HB
ISBN 978-1-915629-41-8 PB
May 2025
Cover image: Patrick Cotter
