So Much More Handsome 

Matthew Reynolds

You might expect a landing light to be bright, a herald of safe arrival, but the light Don Paterson had most in mind when naming his new collection is weaker and less sure. ‘The Landing’ (one of two poems echoing the title) locates its protagonist halfway up the stairs, between the ‘complex upper light’ and ‘the darker flight/that fell back to the dead’. In-betweens are this volume’s favourite places and often – as here – they allow something eerie and compelling to be perceived, but not grasped.

Halfway up the stairs, the speaker is in ‘half-shade’ – an engagingly not-quite-tautologous phrase, shade being itself a half-light and a half-darkness. Here, a domesticated Orpheus, he twangs his guitar:

and listened to the notes I drew
go echoing underground

then somewhere in the afternoon
the thrush’s quick reply –

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