This collection, which won the 2015 Costa Poetry Award, is an exhibition of the Dundee-born poet’s stunningly accomplished adoption of the sonnet’s ancient structure
This collection from Don Paterson, his first since the Forward Prize–winning Rain in 2009, is a series of forty luminous sonnets. Some take a traditional form, while others experiment with the reader’s conception of the sonnet, but they all share the lyrical intelligence and musical gift that has made Paterson one of our most celebrated poets.
Addressed to friends and enemies, the living and the dead, children, musicians, poets, and dogs, these poems are as ambitious in their scope and tonal range as in the breadth of their concerns. Here, voices call home from the blackout and the airlock, the storm cave and the séance, the coal shed, the war, the highway, the forest, and the sea. These are voices frustrated by distance and darkness, which ring with the “sound that fades up from the hiss, / like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing, / now full of its only note, its lonely call.”
In 40 Sonnets, Paterson returns to some of his central themes―contradiction and strangeness, tension and transformation, the dream world, and the divided self―in some of the most powerful and formally assured poems of his career.

40 Sonnets

Literature & Fiction

Paterson, Don.

Poetry

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

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.

Rain

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.

Rain: Poems

Nil Nil

Tricks of the mind and travails of the flesh, dream-life and class politics, mystery and music, sexual obsession and the consolations of drink - all play their part in Nil Nil, Don Paterson's first collection of poems. A formidable stylist, Paterson brings great skill and imaginative daring to bear on subject matter that is always of real importance, and frequently disturbing.

Faber&Faber

After the award-winning success of NIL NIL, poet Don Paterson moves into yet more dangerous and exhilarating territory. Straight autobiography mixes with invention, exaggeration, technical dazzle, and sheer cheek in a book of poetry quite unlike any other.

God's Gift to Women

Echoing one of the great Spanish poets of the twentieth century, the author crafts a series of beautiful poems that document his spiritual journey while at the same time paying homage to the style of Antonio Machado. Original.

The Eyes

The Poem attempts to answer several questions: what is a poem? In what way is its use of language distinct? What conditions allow it to arise, and what is its cultural purpose? And how, exactly, do poems work? Part polemic, part technical treatise and part meditation, The Poem is an ambitious contemporary ars poetica. Paterson looks at the writing, transmission and reading of poetry with wit and scholarly flair, drawing together literary analysis, linguistics, metaphysics, psychology and cognitive science in a thorough exploration of how and why poems are composed.The Poem takes the form of three long essays. ‘Lyric’ attends to the music and sound patterns of poetry, and the way in which they work to deepen poetic sense; ‘Sign’ develops a new theory of metaphor, metonym and symbol, and looks at how ideas of ‘meaning’ change under poetic conditions; ‘Metre’ addresses poetry’s relationship to time and to the rhythms of speech, then builds a theory of prosody from the ground up, proposing some radical correctives to existing metrical theory along the way.Through his various professional guises – as major prize-winning poet, as Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews and as Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan – few are better placed to grant this insider’s perspective. For all those intrigued by the inner workings of the art form and its fundamental secrets, The Poem will challenge, intrigue and surprise.

The Poem (Faber Poetry)

History & Criticism

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.

Orpheus

The Blind Eye is a collection of Don Paterson's funny, irreverent and wise aphorisms. This collection not only entertains but also leads us to ponder on the dark and light that make up the human condition. It's a book to carry and open anywhere - to lighten or darken the moment, but always to administer a jolt to the idling mind.'It is possible for a woman to say, honestly, that she has thought of her lover all day long - but she will neglect to mention the twenty other things she has kept in her head at the same time. A man ignorant of this ability will be terrified by her declaration, since were it to be his . . . it would be a straightforward admission of his own derangement.'

The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Paterson, Don.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Paterson, Don.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Paterson, Don.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

40 Sonnets

Rain

Rain: Poems

40 Sonnets

Nil Nil

God's Gift to Women

The Eyes

The Poem (Faber Poetry)

Orpheus

The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice