Rain man

Rain: Poems by Don Paterson has been given praise of the highest sort: a handful of Heaney comparisons. Carol Anne Duffy wrote in the Guardian, "To read Rain was to have the privilege of seeing a world-class talent assert itself, as Seamus Heaney did with North.” Here's why, according to Dai George's eloquent and intricate critique in the Boston Review:

At the time of Rain’s release, Paterson was 46, and the book could be read as the record of a similar midlife revaluation (one hovers over the word “crisis” but rightly rejects it). The book is governed by elemental, almost symbolist imagery—all rain, wind, ghosts, and eyes—and disarming lyrical directness. Throughout, Paterson salvages full rhyme and stress meter from the doldrums of light verse, deploying these dowdy devices to make fundamental inquiries into a world where “the skies are silent.”

George parses the collection into tender little pieces and ultimately concludes that Rain doesn't quite capture the "spike and tonal complexity"  found in the Paterson of yore. Still, one particular poem capture hits the mark:  

“The Rain at Sea” eschews stress meter in favor of a shapely, loose iambic tetrameter with which Paterson definitively rediscovers his talents. Dextrously inverting the line’s first foot, he frontloads the stress: “How did I blunder into this?” It seems small, but the effect is tremendous. It turns “how” from a query into a question of epic urgency. But better still is what it does to “blunder.”Preceded by two dampened syllables, it pops with palpable self-disgust.