Don Paterson

The Poetry of Don Paterson

Here’s a guy who can write! Pick up one of his books of poetry and discover his talent for writing; and the joy of reading superb poetry. Paterson is Scottish and in addition to writing, works as an editor and musician (jazz guitar). He’s won a number of prizes for his poetry and has edited some collections of poetry – one with Charles Simic.

You can find one of Paterson’s poem’s in a previous post of mine on a review of Love Poems edited by another British poet, James Fenton. The poem included is called “The Gift”, a horrifically ironic take on gift (including a bear) that starts with these lines: “That night she called his name, not mine/And could not call it back”. You will never think of gift in the same way after reading this poem.

Big Frank just finished reading Paterson’s collection of poems in “Landing Light”, for which he won the 2003 Witbread Poetry Award and T.S. Eliot Prize. This is a marvelous collection of poems. It includes both the deadly serious (see above), the thought-provoking, and in all cases the felicity of phrasing is amazing, and the jumps in thought unanticipated. Throughout Paterson operates with regular lines, and with rhymes – although those are often slant.

Here are a few favorite selections from this collection:

“It’s not the lover that we love, but love
itself, love as in nothing, as in O;
love is the lover’s coin, a coin of no country,
hence: the ring; hence: the moon –
no wonder that empty circle so often figures
in our intimate dark, our skin trade,
that commerce so furious we often think
love’s something we share, but we’re always wrong.”
(from My Love -- Landing Light, Greywolf Press 2005)

“After your ninemonth in utero rehab
you’ll hit the ground running as usual, and make
the worst of all possible starts:
penetrating a woman, your mum – of all folk –
with completely unreasonable force.
You would have you arrested. This violence is due,
you will wryly observe (remembering your Dawkins,
before all the books of your last life flare up
in the blistering light of the new) to the size
of your brain; an attribute you and your mother,
for different reasons, agree is not everything.
Ochone, ochone.”
(from My Love -- Landing Light, Greywolf Press 2005)

By the way “ochone” is Scottish for woe or alas!


“When day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you and you refuse
to take that lover’s wound again, that cup
of emptiness, that is our one completion,

I’d say go here, maybe, to our unsung
Innermost isle: Kilda’s antithesis”
(from Lui -- Landing Light, Greywolf Press 2005)

You can actually hear Don Paterson read this poem here.