“... 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 ...”

“... 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 groups of poets: populists and elitists. According to his 2004 anthology, New British Poetry, populists are well-intentioned souls who bring poetry to factories, schools or prisons, ‘via some patronising mediation, some strategy intended to make it “easier”: a visit from a performance poet, or a themed workshop, or a poster campaign with the dumbest, shortest poem the committee can find, set in 50-point bold ...”

“... For Don Paterson Rain works the road; its grey hand passing over and over, in waves: lashing, stotting down. A stour-wind’s in the trees, churning their heads, and the sky’s full of leaves and the sky is raging: it will not subside and will not cease, and will not be consoled. As thunder brings the toads so rain draws worms from the ground, the rapt god to this bedroom window, this house of panic, of closed mouths, a bird trapped in every room ...”

“... Death and the sun are not to be looked at in the face. Maxims, La Rochefoucauld Don Paterson and I were crossing the Wolfe Tone Bridge in Galway contemplating Thomas Crapper. This was at early o’clock in the morning on our way back from an awful curry at the only Indian restaurant open in Galway in the wee hours ...”

“... bardship’. By this time bards were everywhere – in England too. Thomas Gray, a Cambridge don, wrote ‘The Bard’; William Collins, in London, hankered after the ‘Old Runic bards’ of the Highlands. More influentially, though, Edinburgh’s James Macpherson, after the smash-up of Culloden, produced his Fragments of Ancient Poetry, bearing the ...”

“... detail. Several of her best-known poems like ‘I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro’, don’t really expand on the surprise of their conceits. Her most interesting work trades new experiences of Britain with sparkling reminders of life in Pakistan. This is a first book, and it is difficult to predict how she will develop. Too many of the poems ...”

“... anthology is so in tune? They’re missing entirely – no Kathleen Jamie or W.N. Herbert or Don Paterson. Liz Lochhead is the only poet under the age of 50 to be included. The youngest Gaelic poet here is nearly 70. The forked tongues of the newer Scottish poets have been brutally chopped. Watson is strongest in the area of the Makars and in the ...”

“... was: put your money where your mouth is. ‘Must restart civilisation: people who say they care, DON’t care unless they care to the extent of £5 in the spring and £5 in the autumn, ridiculous to say they do, if they won’t run to that, can’t expect a civilisation or grumble if they don’t.’ As for Eliot’s ...”

“... a chronologically arranged selection of Porter’s poems deftly edited by Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson, deals with his Scottish Australian ancestry, and with despair-haunted, hard-drinking, church-building men who have ‘no life but the marking-time of work’. Probably with Porter’s father’s garden in mind, it ends with an image of ...”

“... to Larkin, and thus to any mainstream English poet of the past few decades. (It’s notable that Don Paterson, for example, spends a significant amount of energy positioning his own practice in relation to Prynne’s.) Acceptance, however unlikely it once seemed, has therefore arrived. (I’d like to think that a moment in 2013, when Prynne could be ...”

“... to be published was the polylingual Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse edited by Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Peter Mackay in 2021. As far as I can see, it got no print reviews at ...”

“... the world before it. Trailing in the long wake of The Waste Land, the Cantos, Williams’s Paterson and Bunting’s Briggflatts were Louis Zukofsky’s A, Charles Olson’s Maximus, Allen Ginsbert’s Howl, the substitution of ‘breath’ for metre and gossip for metaphor. Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, with their sedulous imitation of the faux-naif ...”

“... delivered into.’ ‘I did not have the freedom to give you that freedom,’ Kaukab replies, ‘don’t you see?’ Fadime Sahindal’s mother, Elif, testified in court on behalf of her husband (for Wikan, Elif’s betrayal of her daughter is one of the hardest things to penetrate). We could contrast this with the case of Tulay Goren, in the news this ...”