Don Paterson’s most recent poetry collection is The Arctic.
Ruth, I can’t believe none of them knew; on the other hand, it’d only take a few to -ectomise it from the lexicon – and what brave soul’d report that it had gone?
(Lady: ‘I was pleased to note the lack of filthy words in your most admirable work.’Dr Johnson: ‘Yes, indeed Madame; I’m pleased you took the time to hunt for them.’)
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‘The man seems to be under the impression he is God’s gift to womankind,’ said Arthur. Cradling the enormous, rancid bunch of stock he had brought her, Mary reflected that the Holy Father could no more be depended upon to make an appropriate donation than any other representative of Hit sex.
G.K. Chesterton, ‘Gabriel Gale and the Pearl Necklace’
Dundee, and...
A few years back, Don Paterson was warning everyone that contemporary British poetry was under threat. Not from the usual enemies, philistines in government or chain bookshops, but from two...
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...
It’s hard to call any poet a ‘bard’ now except as an ironic jab. Few poetic terms have shifted in significance so much. When, around 1500, William Dunbar called a rival Scottish...
Translation is often thought to be impossible, an ideal, hopeless task. What we get in its name is a pale substitute, a distant echo of a lost original. ‘A poem,’ Don Paterson says in...
Younger Scottish writers seem to be preoccupied by gender. It is a theme crucial equally to Duncan McLean’s novel Bunker Man and to Kathleen Jamie’s poetry collection The Queen of...
Every handful of John Updike’s silver has its square coin, its bad penny, its fake. This exquisitely careful writer tends to relax into flamboyance: it is the verbal equivalent of...
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