Don Paterson

In an assembly of masterful lyrics and monologues, Paterson conjures a series of fables and charms that serve both to expose us to the unsettling forces within the world and simultaneously offer some protection against them.

Rain

A new collection from the award-winning and much-loved poet.

40 Sonnets

Rainer Maria Rilke's 55 Sonnets to Orpheus remain a testimony to a writer whose significance other poets continue to testify to. Don Paterson's translation offers a radiant and at times distressing version of the great work.

A Version of Rilke's Die Sonette an Orpheus

Orpheus

A Boyhood

Toy Fights

Exquisitely sharp, deeply humane and brutally hilarious, Toy Fights is a future classic from one of the greatest writers of his generation. This is a book about family, money and music but also about schizophrenia, hell, narcissists, debt and the working class, anger, swearing, drugs, books, football, love, origami, the peculiar insanity of Dundee, sugar, religious mania, the sexual excesses of the Scottish club band scene and, more generally, the lengths we go to not to be bored. Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He spent his boyhood on a council housing estate. When he wasn't busy dreading his birthdays, dodging kids who wanted to kill him in a game of Toy Fights, working with his country-and-western singer dad, screwing up in the Boys' Brigade, obsessing over God, origami, The Osmonds, stamps, sex or Scottish football cards, he was developing a sugar addiction, failing his exams, playing guitar, falling in love, dodging employment and descending into madness. While he didn't manage to figure out who he was meant to be, the first twenty years of his life - before he took a chance, packed his guitar and boarded a train to London - did, for better or worse, shape who he would become.

Peter Mackay

Kathleen Jamie

A timeless gift edition of the greatest poetic works from Scotland's literary past, present and future. Edited by award-winning poets Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Peter Mackay

The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse

David Vann

Amy Bloom

There is about the elsewhere away from home There is where outsiders search for belonging, visitors discover new cultures, and travelers are lost and found. Features Alan Bissett, Amy Bloom, Jason Donald, Anne Donovan, Rodge Glass, Kirstin Innes, Doug Johnstone, Joan Lingard, Suketu Mehta, Don Paterson, Allan Radcliffe, Eleanor Thom, and David Vann.

There

Don Paterson is not only one of our great poets, but also an esteemed authority on the art of poetry. The Poem is a treatise on the art of poetry in three sections - one on lyric, the music of poetic speech; one on sign, and how poetry makes its unique kind of sense; and one on metre, the rhythm of the poetic line.

Lyric, Sign, Metre

The Poem

Clare Brown

Four times each year, the Poetry Book Society selects the best poetry titles being published and asks the poet to write 500 words on their own work at the time of its publication. The PBS bulletin has published some of the most revealing, candid and insightful statements these poets have ever made. DON'T ASK ME WHAT I MEAN selects the best of these pieces. A genuine Who's Who of late 20th-century verse - Auden, Raine, Gunn, Hughes (who also contributes a remarkable short essay on Sylvia Plath's Ariel), Heaney, R.S. Thomas, Betjeman, Larkin, Merwin, Hecht, Paul Muldoon, Craig Raine, Norman McCaig, Geoffrey Hill, Tom Paulin, Derek Mahon, Sean O'Brien, up to and including contemporary notables such as Simon Armitage, Shapcott, Glyn Maxwell, Lavinia Greenlaw, Carol Ann Duffy, Wendy Cope, Michael Donaghy and Paul Farley.

Poets in Their Own Words

Don't Ask Me what I Mean

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was one of the twentieth century's great lyric poets. Born in Prague in 1875, he was educated in Germany and later in his life moved to Switzerland, where he wrote his two last works, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, both published in 1923. For poets, Orpheus represents the ultimate journey into life and death - the mythical poet who could enchant any living thing - even the beasts and the trees. In this, his fifth collection of poems, Don Paterson, himself a master of the sonnet form, offers a radiant and at times distressing version of the great work. Since his work was translated by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender in the 1930s, Rainer Maria Rilke(1875-1926) has never lost his significance for English-speaking poets. In their various acts of translation, poets such as Auden, Lowell and Randall Jarrell or - more recently - Jo Shapcott, Michael Hofmann and Seamus Heaney, have all testified to Rilke's continuing and primary importance. Don Paterson now joins this company with an entirely new complete translation of the Sonnets to Orpheus. Published in 1923, near the end of his life, the 55 Sonnets to Orpheus were completed in less than a month and famously described by Rilke as 'perhaps the most mysterious - in the way they arrived and entrusted themselves to me - the most enigmatic dictation I have ever received: the whole first part was taken down in a single breathless act of obedience, between the 2nd and 5th of February 1922, without one word being in doubt or having to be changed'. The result was both a masterpiece of German literature and a landmark of modern poetry, pondering the dismembered fate of Orpheus in a belated world - the mythical poet and son of Apollo who could enchant beasts and birds and spirits with his song, and who might have brought his Eurydice back from the dead, had he not turned to look before she set foot in the world of the living. Don Paterson's translation is an act of intensely sustained creative attention, which has produced new poems of remarkable independence. At the same time - and for the first time - the lucidity of this great sequence has been honoured, as well as Rilke's intuition that 'it was the task of transforming the sonnet, of picking it up and, as it were, taking it along on the run, without destroying it, that was in this instance my particular problem and my project'.

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's sonnets of 1609 are as thrilling and persuasive today as they were when they were first published. In this edition of the work, Don Paterson, an award-winning sonneteer and lyric poet in his own right, offers an illuminating and accessible guide to these unforgettable verses.

A New Commentary

Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets

Nick Laird

'So open it anywhere, then anywhere, then anywhere again. We're sure it won't be long before you find a poem that brings you smack into the newness and strangeness of the living present, just as it did us' (from the Introduction) In The Zoo of the New, poets Don Paterson and Nick Laird have cast a fresh eye over more than five centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond. Above all, they have sought poetry that retains, in one way or another, a powerful timelessness: words with the thrilling capacity to make the time and place in which they were written, however distant and however foreign they may be, feel utterly here and now in the 21st Century. This book is the condensed result of that search. It stretches as far back as Sappho and as far forward as the recent award-winning work of Denise Riley, taking in poets as varied as Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks along the way. Here, the mournful rubs shoulders with the celebratory; the skulduggerous and the foolish with the highfalutin; and tales of love, loss and war with a menagerie of animals and objects, from bee boxes to rubber boots, a suit of armour and a microscope. Teeming with old favourites and surprising discoveries, this lovingly selected compendium is sure to win lifelong readers.

A Book of Exceptional Poems from Sappho to Paul Muldoon

The Zoo of the New

Charles Simic

The definitive anthology of contemporary British poetry publishes the work of thirty-five major writers, including Andrew Motion, James Fenton, Glyn Maxwell, Kathleen Jamie, and Alice Oswald, among many others. Original.

New British Poetry

Don Paterson's new collection of poetry starts from the premise that the crisis of mid-life may be a permanent state of mind. Zonal is an experiment in science-fictional and fantastic autobiography, with all of its poems taking their imaginative cue from the first season of The Twilight Zone (1959-1960), playing fast and loose with both their source material and their author's own life. Narrative and dramatic in approach, genre-hopping from horror to Black Mirror-style sci-fi, 'weird tale' to metaphysical fantasy, these poems change voices constantly in an attempt to get at the truth by alternate means. Occupying the shadowlands between confession and invention, Zonal takes us to places and spaces that feel endlessly surprising, uncanny and limitless.

Zonal

Aphorism (n.): a pithy observation which contains a general truth 'All my teachers have been women. Though several men have taken me aside for an hour to tell me things they know' The Book of Shadows contains several hundred reflections and aphorisms on love, God, art, sex, death, work, and the spirit, imagination and conduct of the human animal. Writing with the same mixture of high seriousness, dark humour and lyric precision that define his poetry, Don Paterson has made a book to carry everywhere and open anywhere - to brighten or darken the moment, but always to administer a jolt to the idling mind. 'Falling and flying are near-identical sensations, in all but one final detail. We should remember this when we see those men and women seemingly in love with their own decline'

The Book of Shadows

In this, his first volume of original verse since the award-winning Landing Light, Don Paterson is found writing at his most memorable and direct. In an assembly of masterful lyrics and monologues, he conjures a series of fables and charms that serve both to expose us to the unsettling forces within the world and simultaneously offer some protection against them. Whether outwardly elemental in their address, or more personal in their direction, these poems - to the rain and the sea, to his young sons or beloved friends - never shy from their inquiry into truth and lie, embracing everything in scope from the rangy narrative to the tiny renku. Rain, which includes the winner of this year's Forward Prize for the Best Individual Poem and an extended elegy for the poet Michael Donaghy, is Don Paterson's most intimate and manifest collection to date.

Since his debut, Nil Nil, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1993, Don Paterson has lit up the poetry scene in the U.K. His dazzling, intensely lyric and luminous verse has delighted readers ever since, and won many awards along the way. God's Gift Women took the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997, Landing Light won it again in 2003 and the Whitbread Award besides, and Rain (2009), his most recent collection, won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. This selection, drawn from twenty years of work, is made by the author himself and includes not only those poems from his four single volumes, but his thrilling and original adaptations of the poems of Antonio Machado and Rainer Maria Rilke. For any readers unfamiliar with Don Paterson's work, this Selected Poems offers the perfect introduction to this most captivating of writers; and for fans, an essential gathering from a master craftsman.

Selected Poems

Eloquent, illuminating, and intimate, The Book of Shadows is where the profound, the poetic and the profane meet to glorious effect an hour to tell me things they know' love, God, art, sex, death, work, and the spirit, imagination and conduct of the human animal. Writing with the same mixture of high seriousness, dark humour and lyric precision that define his poetry, Don Paterson has made a book to carry everywhere and open anywhere - to brighten or darken the moment, but always to administer a jolt to the idling mind. detail. We should remember this when we see those men and women seemingly in love with their own decline'

In this, his first volume of original verse since the award-winning Landing Light, Don Paterson is found writing at his most memorable and direct. In an assembly of masterful lyrics and monologues, he conjures a series of fables and charms that serve both to expose us to the unsettling forces within the world and to offer some protection against them. Whether outwardly elemental in their address or more personal in their direction, these poems—addressed to the rain and the sea, to his young sons or beloved friends—never shy from their inquiry into truth and lie, embracing everything in scope from the rangy narrative to the tiny renku. Rain, which includes the winner of this year's Forward Prize for the Best Individual Poem and an extended elegy for the poet Michael Donaghy, is Paterson's most intimate and manifest collection to date.

Poems

Kelley Swain

'Pocket Horizon' sees six UK poets taken under the wing of Don Paterson to develop a new anthology inspired by the wonders of science and medicine.

Don Paterson

Books

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