Don Patterson's Latest Collection Reviewed at The Guardian

The Guardian reviews a new collection by the Scottish poet, Don Patterson. Patterson, who won the 2009 Forward Prize for his previous collection Rain, explores the sonnet in this latest work. More:

Reading a collection, poems sometimes seem to signal to one another. In Don Paterson’s 40 Sonnets, his first book since Rain, which won the 2009 Forward prize, there is a recurring sense of a shoreline. Wave makes this explicit and is a perfect subject for a sonnet, the form a seawall. I love the unlaboured wit, gathering momentum, human appropriation of water, the moment of breaking as a “full confession” and the effortlessly achieved (although I bet it wasn’t): “I was nothing but a fold in her blue gown” – a beautiful line. And I love the acceleration at the end, the sense of completion, with the sea crashing into town like a joyrider.

The opening sonnet, Here, is a conventional piece in heroic couplets, elegantly forming itself around an unconventional subject: a defective heart calling out to a first heart – a mother’s. Again, there is a sense of the littoral: “my dear sea up in arms at the wrong shore/ and her loud heart like a landlord at the door.” Nostalgia offers a further cresting of a wave: “I miss when I was the bloom on the sea.”

Light and dark dominate. Women are remembered in flashes of whiteness: “Your white throat in the dark, the silent flick” (Le Joueur d’Échecs) or “the white curve of her arm gone from the night” (A Vow) or “tall as a white mast of white pine” (Sentinel). The images, whether this was intended or not, brush up against each other in one’s mind. At the same time, there is a darkness that shuts down several poems: “the dark sea at their back like the police” (A Calling) or “where they sink and sail into the dark like cinders” (Nostalgia) or: “And suddenly it went completely dark.” (The Fable of the Open Book). Paterson makes one reflect on how poets give custody to light and darkness: a handover with which no reader can quarrel. [...]

Learn more at The Guardian.