Paul Muldoon is quoted on the back cover of this book: "Don Paterson is simply the most interesting mid-career poet at work in the UK." This might look, to the casual glance, like faint praise, but it isn't. And although I am not thoroughly acquainted with the work of every mid-career poet in the UK, it looks like a plausible assertion, and given the number of awards he's won for his work (Forward prize for this book, Queen's Gold medal, TS Eliot prize, even an OBE) you could justifiably replace "most interesting" with "best". If you didn't mind hurting the feelings of other mid-career UK poets.
Nearer the beginning of his career Paterson traded on a damaged and damaging masculinity, as in the lines from "Imperial" in his second collection, the cheekily titled God's Gift to Women (these lines are the ones you'll find most often quoted): "and no trade was ever so fair or so tender; / so where was the flaw in the plan, / the night we lay down on the flag of surrender / and woke on the flag of Japan . . ."
Fatherhood, if I read the internal evidence of this new collection correctly, has mellowed him, but hasn't diminished the technical mastery. This doesn't simply mean the nicely startling turn of phrase which notices that a tree and a bush buffeted by unheard winds look like, respectively, "a woman mad with grief" and "a panicked silver shoal": it means a fine control of rhythm and rhyme, those two often-neglected handmaidens to poetry. (Paterson, who holds Dante in huge regard, isn't going to neglect them himself.)
Here he is describing his son in "The Circle": "My boy is painting outer space, / and steadies his brush-tip to trace / the comets, planets, moon and sun / and all the circuitry they run / in one great heavenly design. / But when he tries to close the line / he draws around his upturned cup, / his hand shakes, and he screws it up." There is something of the metaphysical about this, and I can't get Abraham Cowley's second Anacreontic, "Drinking", out of my head when I read it. It has an identical structure and also mentions planetary orbits; it's so deceptively simple, so clever: I love the way that, whereas the boy "screws it up", Paterson has closed the stanza with a perfect snap.
Having a sense of humour like this also means he can be audacious with his forms. In a previous collection, Landing Light, he could get away with this couplet, in which he pretends to be stunned into incompetence: "A young man wrote a poem about a rat. / It was the best poem ever written about a rat." And now here he rhymes "zip" with, er, "zip" (and also "god" and "fraud", and, pushing the boundaries somewhat, "hydrangea" and "changer").
Entirely without humour, though, in the sequence "Phantom", dedicated, as is the whole collection, to the poet and musician Michael Donaghy, he uses "death" as the final word in four out of six lines in one stanza, and uses it three more times in the next six, a modern, panic-stricken take on Dunbar's recurring "timor mortis perturbat me" (which, you will recall, is also a poem written about the death of poets).
So when he goes off-piste, as in his homage to the Georgian avant-garde sound artist Natalie Beridze, which is halfway to stretched-out, chopped-up prose, you can still feel you're in safe hands, which is all the more of an achievement if you've never hitherto heard of Ms Beridze or her work, which I confess I hadn't. That he appropriates the jargon of electronic sound sculpture into his poetry – "ring-modulated sound-bursts", etc – in a winning way also tells us we are in the presence of an expert.
But he's at his best, I think, when he uses simple, direct language, short lines, couplets which ram home their point like hammer blows, even if you are not immediately quite sure what the point is. Empson did the same kind of thing, which I suppose is one reason why this is my favourite kind of poetry. ("When are you publishing the answers?" Norman MacCaig was once asked after a particularly dense collection.) But this is enriching, as ambitious about the big questions as poetry can get, and – best of all – memorable.
