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
o 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
Threaded Mode
