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'A classic of its kind.' William Boyd 'Thought-provoking,
hilarious, sardonic and scarily brilliant.' Scotsman 'A work of
dazzling craft.' Times Literary Supplement 'A memoir in a million.'
Sunday Times Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He
spent his boyhood on a council housing estate. When he wasn't busy
dreading his birthdays, dodging kids who wanted to kill him in a
game of Toy Fights, working with his country-and-western singer
dad, obsessing over God, origami, sex or Scottish football cards,
he was developing a sugar addiction, playing guitar and descending
into madness. While he didn't manage to figure out who he was meant
to be, the first twenty years of his life - before he took a
chance, packed his guitar and boarded a train to London - did, for
better or worse, shape who he would become. 'A book that swan-dives
into the filthy waters of growing up and resurfaces clear-eyed,
bearing pearls.' Financial Times 'Paterson is arguably Scotland's
finest writer at work today, his sense of the absurd is acutely
honed, his wisdom hard-won.' The National 'Wonderful, aggressively
wise and always - especially at its most serious - devastatingly
funny.' Geoff Dyer
Don Paterson is one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets,
possessed of “an infinite sensitivity to the world” (Zadie
Smith). But his current standing gives few hints of his hilariously
misspent youth. An indifferent student prone to obsessions (with
girls at school and . . . origami), Paterson nevertheless made
clear early on his immense gift for observation. In Toy Fights, he
vividly re-creates the customs of the Scottish working class, from
the titular childhood game (“basically twenty minutes of extreme
violence without pretext”) to the virtues of the sugary sweet
known as tablet. When American pop culture arrived, Paterson fell
hard for the so-called outlaw sound; by his teens, he was traveling
with his father, a Stetson-wearing “country” musician, and
becoming guitar-mad himself. A memoir of family, music, and highly
inventive profanity, Toy Fights is an unforgettable account of the
years we all spend in rehearsal for real life.
'The Arctic' in Don Paterson's powerful new collection is the name
of a bar frequented by the survivors of several kinds of
apocalypse. The poems gathered here are as various as the
clientele: elegies for the poet's musician father; tales of the
love lives of gods and the childhoods of psychopaths; troubled
encounters between men and women; odes to movies and the male
anatomy; studies of art and ambition, politics and parenthood.
Other voices enter the fray in renderings of Cavafy, Montale and
the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. And in the fourth part of
Paterson's ongoing poem 'The Alexandrian Library', the
poet-as-amateur scientist - from a weather station at the top of
Ben Nevis to the cellar of The Arctic - bears witness to the
imminence of man-made extinction. By turns urgent, railing and
tender, these are poems of and for our times, by one of our most
celebrated and formally adventurous writers.
Exquisitely sharp, deeply humane and brutally hilarious, Toy Fights
is a future classic from one of the greatest writers of his
generation. This is a book about family, money and music but also
about schizophrenia, hell, narcissists, debt and the working class,
anger, swearing, drugs, books, football, love, origami, the
peculiar insanity of Dundee, sugar, religious mania, the sexual
excesses of the Scottish club band scene and, more generally, the
lengths we go to not to be bored. Don Paterson was born in Dundee,
Scotland, in 1963. He spent his boyhood on a council housing
estate. When he wasn't busy dreading his birthdays, dodging kids
who wanted to kill him in a game of Toy Fights, working with his
country-and-western singer dad, screwing up in the Boys' Brigade,
obsessing over God, origami, The Osmonds, stamps, sex or Scottish
football cards, he was developing a sugar addiction, failing his
exams, playing guitar, falling in love, dodging employment and
descending into madness. While he didn't manage to figure out who
he was meant to be, the first twenty years of his life - before he
took a chance, packed his guitar and boarded a train to London -
did, for better or worse, shape who he would become.
Aphorisms have been described as 'the obscure hinterland between
poetry and prose' (New Yorker) - short pithy statements that
capture the essence of the human condition in all its shades. In
this New and Selected, master of the form Don Paterson brings the
best examples from his two previous volumes together with ingenious
new material relevant to today's world. Moving and mischievous,
canny and profound - these wide-ranging observations of no more
than one or two lines demonstrate that the aphorism is the perfect
form for our times. Consciousness is the turn the universe makes to
hasten its own end. * Agnosticism is indulged only by those who
have never suffered belief. * Poet: someone in the aphorism
business for the money.
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.
'The Arctic' in Don Paterson's powerful new collection is the name
of a bar frequented by the survivors of several kinds of
apocalypse. The poems gathered here are as various as the
clientele: elegies for the poet's musician father; tales of the
love lives of gods and the childhoods of psychopaths; troubled
encounters between men and women; odes to movies and the male
anatomy; studies of art and ambition, politics and parenthood.
Other voices enter the fray in renderings of Cavafy, Montale and
the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. And in the fourth part of
Paterson's ongoing poem 'The Alexandrian Library', the
poet-as-amateur scientist - from a weather station at the top of
Ben Nevis to the cellar of The Arctic - bears witness to the
imminence of man-made extinction. By turns urgent, railing and
tender, these are poems of and for our times, by one of our most
celebrated and formally adventurous writers.
Shakespeare's Sonnets are as important and vital today as they were
when first published four hundred years ago. Perhaps no collection
of verse before or since has so captured the imagination of readers
and lovers; certainly no poem has come under such intense critical
scrutiny, and presented the reader with such a bewildering number
of alternative interpretations. In this illuminating and often
irreverent guide, Don Paterson offers a fresh and direct approach
to the Sonnets, asking what they can still mean to the twenty-first
century reader. In a series of fascinating and highly entertaining
commentaries placed alongside the poems themselves, Don Paterson
discusses the meaning, technique, hidden structure and feverish
narrative of the Sonnets, as well as the difficulties they present
for the modern reader. Most importantly, however, he looks at what
they tell us about William Shakespeare the lover - and what they
might still tell us about ourselves.
The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse is a timeless collection of
Scottish poetry. It contains over three hundred poems ranging from
the early medieval period to the twenty-first century, and paints a
full-colour portrait of Scotland's poetic heritage and culture.
Edited and introduced by award-winning poets Kathleen Jamie, Don
Paterson and Peter Mackay, and including poems by Robert Burns,
Carol Ann Duffy, Sorley MacLean, Violet Jacob, William Dunbar, Meg
Bateman, George Mackay Brown, Mairi Mhor nan Oran, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead and many more, The Golden
Treasury of Scottish Verse is a joyous celebration of Scotland's
literary past, present and future.
The only book of its kind, Introduction to South Pacific Law
provides an overview of law in the South Pacific. It sets out the
framework of South Pacific legal systems and also describes the
substantive law on a broad range of topics.Examining both state
laws and customary law, the book highlights common patterns and
explains some of the principal differences between the laws and
legal systems of the countries of the region.The introductory
chapter looks at the development of South Pacific law and at South
Pacific jurisprudence. Individual chapters are devoted to state
laws, customary law, constitutional law, administrative law,
criminal law, family law, contract law, torts law, land law, and
court systems. The book makes extensive reference to legislative
provisions and case law of individual jurisdictions.Including a
discussion of recent changes in the law, this new edition of
Introduction to South Pacific Law is a useful and up-to-date
resource for all those interested in the law of the region.
Don Paterson's latest collection of poetry starts from the premise
that the crisis of mid-life may be a permanent state of mind. Zonal
is an experiment in science-fictional and fantastic autobiography,
with all of its poems taking their imaginative cue from the first
season of The Twilight Zone (1959-1960), playing fast and loose
with both their source material and their author's own life.
Narrative and dramatic in approach, genre-hopping from horror to
Black Mirror-style sci-fi, 'weird tale' to metaphysical fantasy,
these poems change voices constantly in an attempt to get at the
truth by alternate means. Occupying the shadowlands between
confession and invention, Zonal takes us to places and spaces that
feel endlessly surprising, uncanny and limitless.
This new collection from Don Paterson, his first since the Forward
prize-winning Rain in 2009, is a series of forty sonnets. Some take
a more traditional form, some are highly experimental, but what
these poems share is a lyrical intelligence and musical gift that
has been visible in his work since his first book of poems, Nil
Nil, in 2009. Addressed to children, friends and enemies, the
living and the dead, musicians, poets and dogs, these poems display
an ambition in their scope and tonal range matched by the breadth
of their concerns. Here, voices call home from the blackout and the
airlock, the storm cave and the seance, the coalshed, the war, the
ringroad, the forest and the sea. These are voices frustrated by
distance, by shot glass and bar rail, by the dark, leaving the
'sound that fades up from the hiss, / like a glass some random
downdraught had set ringing, / now full of its only note, its
lonely call . . .' In 40 Sonnets Paterson returns to some of his
central themes - contradiction and strangeness, tension and
transformation, the dream world, and the divided self - in some of
the most powerful and formally assured poems he has written to
date. This is a rich and accomplished new work from one of the
foremost poets writing in English today.
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In this, his first volume of original verse since the
award-winning "Landing Light," Don Paterson is found writing at his
most memorable and direct. In an assembly of masterful lyrics and
monologues, he conjures a series of fables and charms that serve
both to expose us to the unsettling forces within the world and to
offer some protection against them. Whether outwardly elemental in
their address or more personal in their direction, these
poems--addressed to the rain and the sea, to his young sons or
beloved friends--never shy from their inquiry into truth and lie,
embracing everything in scope from the rangy narrative to the tiny
renku. "Rain," which includes the winner of this year's Forward
Prize for the Best Individual Poem and an extended elegy for the
poet Michael Donaghy, is Paterson's most intimate and manifest
collection to date.
Nil Nil, Don Paterson's first volume of poetry, won the Forward
Prize for Best First Collection in 1993 and heralded the arrival of
a major new talent. The book presented a new and urgent poetry of
dream-life, mystery and music, sexual obsession and the
consolations of drink - all delivered with great formal skill and
imaginative daring. 'One of the finest first books of poems I've
read for ages.' Paul Muldoon 'If you are wondering whether great
poems are still being written, you ought to read Don Paterson's.'
Charles Simic 'One of the most ferociously talented of all British
poets.' Catherine Lockerbie
The Poem attempts to answer several questions: what is a poem? In
what way is its use of language distinct? What conditions allow it
to arise, and what is its cultural purpose? And how, exactly, do
poems work? Part polemic, part technical treatise and part
meditation, The Poem is an ambitious contemporary ars poetica.
Paterson looks at the writing, transmission and reading of poetry
with wit and scholarly flair, drawing together literary analysis,
linguistics, metaphysics, psychology and cognitive science in a
thorough exploration of how and why poems are composed. The Poem
takes the form of three long essays. 'Lyric' attends to the music
and sound patterns of poetry, and the way in which they work to
deepen poetic sense; 'Sign' develops a new theory of metaphor,
metonym and symbol, and looks at how ideas of 'meaning' change
under poetic conditions; 'Metre' addresses poetry's relationship to
time and to the rhythms of speech, then builds a theory of prosody
from the ground up, proposing some radical correctives to existing
metrical theory along the way. Through his various professional
guises - as major prize-winning poet, as Professor of Poetry at the
University of St Andrews and as Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan
- few are better placed to grant this insider's perspective. For
all those intrigued by the inner workings of the art form and its
fundamental secrets, The Poem will challenge, intrigue and
surprise.
WINNER OF THE WHITBREAD PRIZE FOR POETRY 2003 Landing Light is Don
Paterson's most accomplished and spiritual collection to date. In
these poems, he guides us down the labyrinths of our deepest and
most private concerns, pursuing the intimacy that the spoken - as
well as the printed - word brings. Ceaselessly inquiring, deftly
tuned into the emotional crackle of the world, Paterson explores
the swings of light and dark that mark our most troubling feelings:
utterance and silence, disclosure and concealment, and ultimately
the need to both renew and to face finality. 'I couldn't get Don
Paterson's brilliant Landing Light out of my head.' Spectator 'The
most animated and animating volume of new poems I have read for
years.' Times Literary Supplement
Nil Nil, Don Paterson's first volume of poetry, won the Forward
Prize for Best First Collection in 1993 and heralded the arrival of
a major new talent. The book presented a new and urgent poetry of
dream-life, mystery and music, sexual obsession and the
consolations of drink - all delivered with great formal skill and
imaginative daring.
'This is the night mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque
and the postal order...' -- W.H. Auden Wordsworth was the first
laureate of locomotives: in fact he railed against them, and
against the consequent opening up of the Lakes to holiday hordes
('On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway'). His dismay was
echoed down the decades by disturbed ruralists, and yet the train
has become part of our psychic landscape: some of the best-loved
English poems - Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop', or Philip Larkin's
'Whitsun Weddings' - have celebrated carriages, platforms and
waiting rooms, while locomotion has inspired some of the most
characteristic poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Stevenson,
Hardy and MacNeice, Betjeman and Auden (whose 'Night Mail' was
written to accompany a 1930s GPO documentary about the postal
express from Euston to Glasgow). Co-edited by two of our most
distinguished poets, Train Songs offers a round tour - from
Wordsworth to Hugo Williams and beyond - starting from the poetry
of departures and brief encounters, but taking in the American
Blues, the troop trains of two world wars, and the addiction to
speed which characterised the European revolutions. Trains have
carried the freight of history from the Industrial Revolution
onwards - the Armstice in 1918 was signed in a railway carriage,
the death camps were organised around train timetables - and this
new anthology shows how the train in all its forms has exercised a
unique hold upon our collective unconscious.
Rainer Maria Rilke's 55 Sonnets to Orpheus remain a testimony to a
writer whose significance other poets continue to testify to. Don
Paterson's translation offers a radiant and at times distressing
version of the great work.
'So open it anywhere, then anywhere, then anywhere again. We're
sure it won't be long before you find a poem that brings you smack
into the newness and strangeness of the living present, just as it
did us' (from the Introduction) In The Zoo of the New, poets Don
Paterson and Nick Laird have cast a fresh eye over more than five
centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond. Above
all, they have sought poetry that retains, in one way or another, a
powerful timelessness: words with the thrilling capacity to make
the time and place in which they were written, however distant and
however foreign they may be, feel utterly here and now in the 21st
Century. This book is the condensed result of that search. It
stretches as far back as Sappho and as far forward as the recent
award-winning work of Denise Riley, taking in poets as varied as
Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara,
Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks along the way. Here, the mournful
rubs shoulders with the celebratory; the skulduggerous and the
foolish with the highfalutin; and tales of love, loss and war with
a menagerie of animals and objects, from bee boxes to rubber boots,
a suit of armour and a microscope. Teeming with old favourites and
surprising discoveries, this lovingly selected compendium is sure
to win lifelong readers.
Poets have been fascinated and challenged by the sonnet ever since
it was imported from Italy to England in the sixteenth century.
With its fourteen lines, inexhaustibly variable, it has met
particular needs of almost every major poet from Thomas Wyatt to
Paul Muldoon. Don Paterson, himself an adept of the form, has
devised an anthology that is both a sharing of personal favourites
and a celebration of high moments in the sonnet's history. His
introduction and wonderfully insightful notes provide a history and
commentary that will prove illuminating to the casual reader and
indispensable to the student or aspiring sonneteer.
Other Ways to Leave the Room features the work of three of the most
beloved and lauded poets currently at large. Between them, Kathleen
Jamie, Don Paterson and Nick Laird write lyrical, luminous and
often darkly witty poems about the rugged wildness of the Scottish
landscape; about fatherhood; about whisky-drinking, alcohol abuse
and tenement life; about sex, love and the pursuit of the
spiritual; about childhood in the Ireland of the Troubles, and
about the strange possibilities of the technological future. What
all three have in common is an ability to combine observations of
gritty real life with a sense of the mythical proportions always
lurking just under the surface of the everyday. The Penguin Modern
Poets are succinct guides to the richness and diversity of
contemporary poetry. Every volume brings together representative
selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the
curious reader and the seasoned lover of poetry to encounter the
most exciting voices of our moment.
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