Selected Poems

by Don Paterson

Since his debut, Nil Nil, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1993, Don Paterson has lit up the poetry scene in the U.K. His dazzling, intensely lyric and luminous verse has delighted readers ever since, and won many awards along the way. God's Gift Women took the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1997, Landing Light won it again in 2003 and the Whitbread Award besides, and Rain (2009), his most recent collection, won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

This selection, drawn from twenty years of work, is made by the author himself and includes not only those poems from his four single volumes, but his thrilling and original adaptations of the poems of Antonio Machado and Rainer Maria Rilke. For any readers unfamiliar with Don Paterson's work, this Selected Poems offers the perfect introduction to this most captivating of writers; and for fans, an essential gathering from a master craftsman.

Genres: Poetry

169 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2012

About the author

Don Paterson (b. 1963) is a Scottish poet and writer. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, aphorism, criticism, memoir and poetic theory. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, three Forward Prizes, the T.S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of St. Andrews, and for twenty-five years was Poetry Editor at Picador MacMillan. He has long had a parallel career as a jazz guitarist.

He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus.

Reviews

[ciel]

you make me wanna go fishing, don.

[Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shows his development over 16 years from early almost laddish verse (the pint of Murphy’s, the pishing into the wind) to sophisticated versions of Rilke. ‘A Private Bottling’ from the God’s Gift to Women collection is a lovely evocation of the tastes and scents of fine malt whisky, the poet respectfully taking leave of a love affair via a ‘chain of nips / in a big fairy-ring’. ‘Letter to the Twins’ from Landing Light advises his infant sons on the art of pleasuring a woman with tongue and hand (‘the honouring of your lover’). Others are a bit opaque, but overall the collection showcases well what has turned out to be only the first half of a stellar career. Time for an update that includes his prose about Shakespeare and the poetry form?

[Alana · Rating 3 out of 5]

so anyways, imagine if mike skinner got really into cheap paperbacks of the classics and ended up writing these poems instead of making original pirate material. things aren’t always going to plan, as they mostly don’t, and we need not shy away from this fact. especially if we want anything resembling a good time™️ maintained solely upon keeping your wits plugged into a droll chuckle between each blanket-bath and sad wank. then he gets older starts doing pretty versions of rilke because of course fkn he is.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don Paterson's first Selected Poems seems a long time coming. Simon Armitage published his first collection only four years before Paterson, yet published his Selected Poems a decade ago. You could make a case that Armitage is more prolific, and that would carry some weight. You could make another case that Paterson is better, and that might carry more. Most other British poets are the warm-up. Paterson is the main event.

He'd probably swing for me for saying this, but it's hard not to feel an almost paternal sense pride at seeing a writer whose work you've followed since his first book do so well. Not to belittle either his numerous awards or the big names that have tuned in to him, but it's the feeling that you found him first that sticks.

One of the pleasures of a Selected Poems is guessing in advance which poems will make the cut, which won't, and seeing the final result. I'm happy to note only three I'd expected to see aren't included here ('Graffito' and 'Seed' from Nil Nil, 'Prologue' from God's Gift to Women), and happier still to note the entire 'Alexandrian Library' series has been left out.

What's been left in tells an interesting, between-the-lines story. The bite and brashness of the early work is vividly intact, as in 'Filter', in the closing stanza of 'Nil Nil', and in my enduring favourite 'An Elliptical Stylus' - a poem that breaks the fourth wall in the middle and closes with a fist shaken at the audience:

'But if you still insist on resonance -
I'd swing for him, and every other ****
happy to let my father know his station,
which probably includes yourself. To be blunt.'

Most great writers are two people, if not more: their art grows out of the splits in their personalities. The man that 'tilted the bottle towards the sun / until it detonated with light / my lips pursed like a trumpeter's' is also the man that twice urges you that nothing really matters. Among other things, it's the split between Paterson's erudition and urge to demolish that charges his poems.

The oeuvre, too. Not that the early work lacks tenderness, but the further you go, the more you see of it in the poems, trusted to stand on its own without getting too misty-eyed or too wised-up, as we see in 'Advice to Young Husbands', 'Waking with Russell', 'The Swing' and 'Correctives':

'The shudder in my son's left hand
he cures with one touch from his right,
two fingertips laid feather-light
to still his pen. He understands

the whole man must be his own brother
for no man is himself alone;
though some of us have never known
the one hand's kindness to the other.'

Helping to keep the whole in balance is Paterson's sense of fun. This applies to typography (as in 'Sigh' and 'Poem'); the poet's subject matter ('Two Trees') and in the prankish 'On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him'.

As a volume, this has been long overdue: tender and angry, alert and vigorous, I doubt a better Selected Poems will be published this year.

[Thomas Goddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve always loved poetry and have a very solid idea of what it should be. In short: poetry should be what I think it is and not stray from that idea otherwise I decide that it is awful and should be burnt... I’m looking at you Rupi.

That said, I will occasionally step out from behind my poetry barricade - built out of the volumes of Keats, Shelly, Larkin, Hughes, Thomas (Dylan and R.S.) and Michaels.

And I’ll find someone like Paterson. Someone I could almost absorb into my little poetry world, if it wasn’t for a few clangers.

This collection is a great overview of his work, but therein lies the issue for me. I couldn’t enjoy it all because it was so disparate in nature. I can respect a career that is varied, but in a collection if you add juvenalia alongside more mature work you’re asking to befuddle.

I’ll definitely explore more of Paterson’s work. I particularly enjoyed his Book of Shadows a few years ago (a decade, if I’m honest) and, as a result, he is on my radar. All I need is a nice clear collection now. It doesn’t have to be collected or selected. I’ll focus on a themed output next time, for the consistency that comes with real targeted curation.

If anyone has read one of his that was particularly good, let me know in the comments.

Poems that just astounded me:

Candlebird, The Lover, The Reading, Leaving, Rain.

Not perfect, but a very good read.

[Clare Fletcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoy the poems by this poet; especially as he has written one about the island that I know call home that totally captures the unique atmosphere of the place.

[Elliot Books Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

shit rules

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 2 out of 5]

so much fishing
so much strange poems about women
in a almost misogynistic way. didn’t like it

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

For non-British readers in the United States, this book might present some slight difficulties in places due to the occasional use of archaic language and culture-specific references. But any challenge this may present to the reader is certainly smoothed over by Patterson's accomplished use of rhythm and rhyme. He's won an armful of important awards for his verse and is certainly more accessible than a lot of other poets writing in the States who value obfuscation for its own sake.

Quite simply, Patterson is too important and good a poet for any serious reader of contemporary poetry to ignore. There are a lot of memorable, striking lines and images in this collection, including the cheeky/clever poem entitled "On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him"..... which is followed by nothing at all...the rest of the page after the poem title being blank.

My favorite poem though comes early on in the collection, Bedfellows, which reminded me a bit of Charles Simic:


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"

[Nigel Currie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems were beautifully written, but I found it difficult to engage with them. There was only one, The Day, that I really liked, the way it opened up suddenly this perspective of lovers on a different planet looking at our star and despairing of the distance that means we'll never meet.


'But it's still so sad,' he says. 'Think: all of us
as cut off as the living from the dead.
It's the size that's all wrong here. The emptiness.'
She says, 'Well, it's a miracle I found you
in all this space and dust.' He turns his head
and smiles the smile she recognized him through.'


For most of the book it felt like spending time with that friend whose taste in music is so exacting that he sneers at anything you've ever heard of and raves endlessly about an obscure group who turn out to have released only one EP of slightly ironic baroque-disco-country crossover.

[Eleanor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gets much better as it goes on--the poems from Rain are probably the best. But at its best, the poetry is intimate and deep and thoughtful and smiling and sad. Good stuff.