Don Paterson (born in Dundee in 1963), is one of a group of younger British poets accomplished in traditional forms, but working in very contemporary sensibilities and idioms. Gray Wolf has come out with a New and Selected called <u>The White Lie</u>. Paterson has also edited an anthology of 101 Sonnets for Faber & Faber, which I highly recommend. Not only for the selection of sonnets, old and new, but for the insightful and often hilarious short scholia on them at the back.

I find him a very interesting poet, with intelligence and texture, but I think he will not be to everyone's taste. As Jan Schrieber pointed out in a very thorough review on Expansive Poetry Online (I think scroll down to Reviews archive), his is a poetry of the [angry] young man, full of sex and violence and, well, obscurity. It strikes me as earned obscurity, however; and the poems reward close rereading. He is also capable of a tender lyricism.

Nonetheless, he will certainly offend some sensibilities. He manages to write strangely beautiful poems with such titles as "Buggery," and rhymes blunt with the c word...

Here are some poems of his that particularly struck me.

This had adumbrations of Larkin for me, only more sinister. Note the skilled consonantal slant rhymes:


Bedfellows


An inch or so above the bed
the yellow blindspot hovers
where the last incumbent's greasy head
has worn away the flowers

Every night I have to rest
my head in his dead halo;
I feel his heart tick in my wrist;
then, below the pillow,

his suffocated voice resumes
its dreary innuendo:
there are other ways to leave the room
than the door and the window


One of his sonnets:

Pioneer


It's here I would have come to pass away
the final hour before the boat's departure;
the bluff side of the Law, between the harbour
and the dark, cetacean barrow of Balgay.

Twin trains of headlights inched across the river--
the homebound day-shift--trail-blazing cars
like angels on the starry escalator
of the bridge's tapering, foreshortened spar.

I tried to see it as a burning lance
angling for the slicked, black shoals of Fife
or a bowsprit, swung and steeved against the south

to help ride out her hellish afterlife:
the stubborn, rammish sap still on my hands,
the taste of her, like a coin laid in my mouth.


This has a (creepy) nursery rhyme quality in its swinging dimeter and slant rhymes:

oo :oo Law Tunnel
leased to the Scottish Mushroom Company after its closure in 1927

(i)
In the airy lull
between the wars
they cut the rails
and closed the doors

on the stalled freight:
crate on crate
of blood and earth--
the shallow berth

of the innocents,
their long room
stale and tense
with the same dream


(ii)

Strewn among
the ragged queue--
the snoring king
and his retinue,

Fenfir, Pol Pot,
Captain Oates
and the leprechauns--
are the teeth, the bones

and begging-cup
of the drunken piper.
The rats boiled up
below the sleepers


(iii)

The crippled boy
of Hamelin
pounds away
at the locked mountain

waist-deep in thorn
and all forlorn,
he tries to force
the buried doors

I will go to my mother
and sing of my shame
I will grow up to father
the race of the lame

I like these very much. The first made me laugh out loud. I was drinking some iced tea (in mid winter!) and managed to slosh it over my shirt. These are mordant, cruel and funny. The third managed to conjure up not just the Pied Piper but Amahl and the Night Visitors, though I'm sure the opera, not very interesting in itself, was not on his mind as much as the folk-type. "Strewn among/ the ragged queue/...are the teeth,the bones/adn begging cup/of the drunken piper." The image of a dead piper,who promised salvation, delivered, and then stole the children when the Fee wasn't paid, and the crippled boy who is trying to get in (late arrival? questor?)who promises to "father the race of the lame" is bleak beyond any belief, but is also funny. I take it the italicized words are expressions of his intent. "...will go..." where? Are his parents inside the locked mountain? Or will he go back to his mother? I took it the second way but it is deliciously ambiguous. And it turns out that he does not actually mention his father, as the line "I will grow up to father" which sounds like a reference to his pop turns out to be one in which "father" is a verb. This strikes me as a very Catholic poem in some ways. Since I'm not a Catholic I don't know why. All that mom and pop stuff, I guess: redemption, guilt (or at least unexplained shame--because he failed at the mountain? because he is defective?--are the two really the same,physical embodiment of a qualitative flaw, as in a melodrama?).

I like the philosophical distance and also the "finish" here. These do not strike me as crude, though I'm sure many here will find them offensive. They are a good anti-dote to the goo. Beauty can be stark and need not always be uplifting in the homiletic sense. Sometimes it can be a little frightening and absurd, sometimes a laugh. Good to see that there are those writing with a bit of stomach and a bit of shine as well.

Thanks very much for posting these. I will try to find some Paterson at the library.




[This message has been edited by David Westheimer (edited February 25, 2003).]

I forgot to add that Paterson has a website, at www.donpaterson.com

I like his poems very much, Alicia.
And I agree about 101 Sonnets, an excellent anthology with some interesting and unusual selections.
Regards,
David

Thanks, Alicia, for posting these. Here's The White Lie, which I discovered somewhere on the web sometime last year I think, and have saved like a secret diamond in my files. Did he also write the poem about the sick boy and his mother in the waiting room ? Ah, either way, you've prompted me to order the book.

BTW, Alicia, those are gorgeous, gorgeous poems in the current issue of Pivot. You ever remind me why I turn to poetry.

The White Lie
--Don Paterson


I have never opened a book in my life,
made love to a woman, picked up a knife,
taken a drink, caught the first train
or walked beyond the last house in the lane.
Nor could I put a name to my own face.
Everything we know to be the case
draws its signal colour off the sight
till what falls into that intellectual night
we tunnel into this view or another
falls as we have fallen. Blessed Mother,
when I stand between the sunlit and the sun
make me glass: and one night I looked down
to find the girl look up at me and through
me with such a radiant wonder, you
could not read it as a compliment
and so seek to return it; in the event
I let us both down, failing to display
more than a half-hearted opacity.
She turned her face from me, and the light stalled
between us like a sheet, a door, a wall.
But consider this: that when we leave the room,
the chair, the bookend or the picture-frame
we had frozen by desire or spent desire
is reconsumed in its estranging fire
such that, if we slipped back by a road
too long asleep to feel our human tread
we would not recognise a thing by name,
but think ourselves in Akhenaten's tomb.
Then, as things ourselves, we would have learnt
we are the source, not the conducting element.
Imagine your shadow burning off the page
as the dear world and the dead word disengage—
in our detachment we would surely offer
such offence to that Love that will suffer
no wholly isolated soul within
its sphere, it would blast straight through our skin
just as the day would flush out the rogue spark
it found still holding to its private dark.
But like our ever-present, all-wise god
incapable of movement or of thought,
no one at one with all the universe
can touch one thing; in such supreme divorce
what earthly use are we to our lost brother
if we must stay partly lost to find each other?
Only by this—this shrewd obliquity
of speech, the broken word and the white lie,
do we check ourselves, as we might halt the sun
one degree from the meridian
then wedge it by the thickness of the book
that everything might keep the blackedged look
of things, and that there might be time enough
to die in, dark to read by, distance to love.

I am so glad others are enjoying these poems. I do recommend <u>The White Lie</u>. It has an unusually high percentage of fine and memorable poems (particularly the short ones), often with a dark sense of humor. Even the ones I didn't like at first have started to grow on me. I am something of a fan, myself.

I actually bought the book entirely on the strength of this poem, which appeared some months back on Poetry Daily:

The Wreck

Thanks, Wendy, for your kind words on the Pivot poems.

Hope tis collection includes 'A private Bottling'. Too long to print here on rationed time, but IMO a wonderfully seductive (and prizewinning) poem, if opaque in parts. Margaret.

Hi Alicia,

I've been reading Don Paterson for a while now. I like him very much. His topics are fresh and his voice sounds so genuine. I have an uncorrected proof (so I'm not to blame for typos) of The White Lie and a signed first copy of Nil Nil. Here is one I like from The White Lie.

Imperial
by Don Paterson

Is it normal to get this wet? Baby, I'm frightened---
I covered her mouth with my own;
she lay in my arms till the storm-window brightened
and stood at our heads like a stone

after months of jaw jaw, determined that neither
win ground, or be handed the edge,
we gave ourselves up, one to the other
like prisoners over a bridge

and no trade was ever so fair or so tender;
so where was the flaw in plan,
the night we lay down on the flag of surrender
and woke on the flag of Japan

Having gone to read the TS Eliot lecture linked over on General Talk, I went digging in the archives & found this thread. I'm bumping it back up in the hope people will post more poems of his, so I can read them. Greg? Anyone? I should buy some books.

Alicia

Thanks for the (belated) introduction *grin*. I'm impressed.

Thanks, Chris, for bumping this back up. Here's his new website:

http://www.donpaterson.com/poetry.html

[This message has been edited by Jerry Glenn Hartwig (edited October 16, 2005).]