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An excellent, comprehensive selection of Don Paterson's
work, made by the author himself, covering all of the published collections
since 1993 - Nil Nil, God's Gift to Women, Landing Light and Rain - and selections from
Paterson's collections of versions of Antonio Machado and Rainer Maria Rilke,
The Eyes
and Orpheus.
Nil Nil
(1993) introduces themes and styles that Paterson has perfected in his
subsequent collections: a studied musicality, strong rhythms and traditional
form, coupled to personal experience and sometimes demotic expression, as in
'Morning Prayer', which exemplifies his colloquial bravado coupled to a
classical lyricism. The poem 'Nil Nil' itself explores the vernacular nostalgia
of football league. Elsewhere, sex and relationships abound in the early
poems, as do familial anecdotes tempered by more knowing, self-reflexive
metafictional or postmodern moments. 'Amnesia' couples all of these effects
together to present a poem about sexual education in which two recalled
sexual conquests sandwich a moment of limbo in which 'the room stopped like a
lift'. The beginning of the poem shows the focus on rhythm, phrasing and
vocabulary, which characterises much of Paterson's work:
I was, as
they later confirmed, a very sick boy.
The star
performer at the meeting-house,
My eyes
rolled back to show the whites, my arms
Outstretched
in catatonic supplication
While I
gibbered impeccably in the gorgeous tongues
Of the aerial ordersÉ
A favourite is simply titled 'Poem', after Ladislav Skala, which reveals
metaphors within metaphors and sets up the existential interests that will
later emerge in the versions of Rilke's Orpheus sonnets.
God's Gift to Women
continues the themes set up by the earlier collection, introducing some
darker undertones, but developing the formal concerns of stanza, rhyme
schemes, rhythm and traditional shape. 'Imperial' continues the sexual
relationship themes, while 'A Private Bottling' is a tour de force poem
centering on whiskey, and which brings the formal poetic concerns and the
demotic, erotic subjects together in a long poem of considerable power.
Sitting up all night drinking the narrator waits for dawn then slips
Back to the
bed where she lies curled,
Replace the
live egg of her burning ass
Gently, in
the cold nest of my lap,
As dead to
her as she is to the world.
There is a considerable playfulness on offer in Paterson's work, from his
blank page poem 'On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and
Not Finding Him', to the listing of '14:50: Rosekinghall' and the erotic
liveliness of many of the poems in these first two early collections.
The selections from the later Landing Light demonstrate the more
formalised lyric poet, with
poems that are demonstrably in a post-Heaneyesque mode of empirical lyricism,
tempered by a Muldoon-esque play of language: everyday concerns, direct
address, traditional stanzaic forms, controlled quatrains, linguistic play
and formal daring, but also with the addition of a little mystery and lyric
heightening. The vocabulary often reaches after the 'poetic' in these later
poems - Paterson is the kind of poet who will call it Michaelmas instead of
Christmas, who will write of 'creed' rather than belief, and who comfortably
emulates Dantean ideas and effects in his poems. Childhood memories are
abundant, as are poems about being a father ('The Thread', 'Waking With
Russell', and 'Letter to the Twins'), which are, amongst other things,
tender, fatherly, and faultlessly formal. Paterson is comfortable in nature,
in the outdoors, but is never a 'nature poet'. There are ballad-like poems in
'The Forest of Suicides', 'The Hunt' and 'A Fraud', and a sense of myth and
history which lend the work scope and range. Paterson's models and subjects
by now have become broadly classical - he's quite happy to write poems about
'the lyre' - and there are several poems about poetry itself - the excellent
'A Fraud' and 'The Rat', which serves as a moral fable for all
writer-teachers. These selections from Landing Light also show some formal
variety in the half-rhymed couplets of 'The Wreck' and a couple of poems in
Scots.
The selection from Paterson's most recent collection Rain (2009) continue the
mode into which the poet has now comfortably grown: lyric assuredness,
writing about the familiar and familial, taking on poetry itself and its
classical big themes. Take 'Why Do You Stay Up So Late', in which the
father-poet explains to his son why he sits up all night writing poetry,
collecting 'the dull things of the day' until he can find some possibility
for poetry in them and then 'paint it with the tear to make it bright'. It's
touching and impeccably achieved, although there is something a bit antique
in his repetitive Dickinson-esque quatrains of several other poems, with
their na•ve rhythms and rhymes, their attachment to poeticised lexis, and
their overly-insistent tetrameter.
The poems selected here from his versions of Rilke's Orpheus demonstrate a
different kind of lyric poet in full command of the mythic, existential mode
of the beautiful, stand-alone traditional sonnet:
Be; and at
the same time know the state
Of non-being,
the boundless inner sky,
That this
time you might fully honour it.'
(from 'The Passing')
These are plangent, forceful poems; a rallying cry to full spiritual being
and lyric expression. In a similar, yet slightly more surreal style, the
versions of Antonio Machado, published as The Eyes, show Paterson as
more than simply a lyric traditionalist - there's a formal range and variety
to these poems (which encompasses visual poems too) and a more symbolic,
elemental approach to poetry, language and experience. Overall, this Selected
Poems
brings together Paterson's very best work over nearly 20 years, and shows the
breadth of approach and subject that has, quite rightly, made him one of the
most notable traditional lyric poets of recent years.
© Andy Brown
2012
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