"Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets" by Don Paterson (Faber, 2010)

Of all the well-known poets, Paterson's the one I feel the most in sympathy with - in his attitude to poetry, how far he theorizes and what he theorizes about, etc. In the introduction he writes "I formed a vague plan to read one or two sonnets a day, keep a record of my thoughts, feelings, gut reactions and reflections ... I revised these notes as little as possible, and hope that this book has retained the feel of the 'reading diary' that it was", p.X. The result is entertaining and informative.

He comments on the poems as a poet ("being a poet, I'm always keenly aware of less noble reasons for doing things. It's entirely possible that WS separated the poems so that we wouldn't notice he'd recycled his rhymes", p.117) and as a man who's been in and out of love, who's heard all the excuses before. He tries to follow the plot of Shakespeare's emotions through the series, distinguishing the mere conceits from the expressions of emotion. His paraphrases are useful, his judgements uninhibited ("It begins with ... a rather dull run of seventeen poems", XIII).

When the poems fail, they do so in various ways - they're confused, boring, repetitive, commissioned, etc. Some are of interest only as psychological reports (WS doesn't come over as especially self-aware). At times Paterson sounds like a forthright workshop commenter

• "But l.4 is a nightmare. No one knows what it means. This is bad, as I'm pretty certain that WS intended a single meaning, or at least an uppermost one", p.75
• "... is just about the most pointless run of alliteration in the Sonnets, and the sign of a poet clutching at straws", p.195

He thinks that the ordering and numbering were under Shakespeare's control, and that some numbers were especially significant. He tries to date some of the poems, using his knowledge of history, the plays and stylistic clues - "I think we can infer a fair gap of time between sonnets 99 and 100 - not least because he's started to write well again", p.288

He reminds us that things were different in those days

• "Back then, puns held a lot more entertainment value than they do now; they had to. A good new pun did the rounds like a viral video", p.315
• "its" didn't exist and they had fewer punctuation symbols

Sometimes he takes a break from the sonnets, giving us his opinions - he

• has a theory of metrical analysis
• has a theory of metaphor
• thinks that few couplets work. "subtitles-for-the-thick" (p.269)
• believes criticism shouldn't be too serious
• knows that poets have tricks that non-poets aren't always aware of
• prefers poetry-writing where the poet's exploring

He gives us his context-setting opinions -

• "The question 'was Shakespeare gay?' is so stupid as to be barely worth answering, but for the record: of course he was", p.XIII
• "If we just read the poem, we read half the poem; we should also read the author (... I used to hold the opposite position - i.e. the New critical line ... I was wrong. There's a continuity between author, text and reader, and a rich reading engages with its whole length", p.206
• "No one, however, has exploited the possibilities of the thematic domain quite like WS, who will often sever words from their native part of speech and even primary denotation, and allow them to float free and orient themselves according to the weird magnetic force-field of the poem alone", p.237
• "For me, the problem with the most elaborate Elizabethan poetry is that it's predicated on a non-existent type of reader, and I'll stop there, before I say something career-destroyingly unfashionable about John Donne", p.468

Here's a sample of his views on particular sonnets

• 10 "Another dull one", p.34
• 29 "There's very little here to lift it out of the mundane ... this sonnet has often been placed among the very greatest", p.88
• 36 "This is one of the very few sonnets, incidentally, which Coleridge regarded as of the first water ... STC had a point-system ... Only eight [sonnets] gained top marks. His choices are utterly bizarre ... I like this one too", p.110
• 37 "the whole poem turns out to be a shoddy patchwork of ideas and effects WS has developed or will develop elsewhere, and has no thematic coherence whatsoever", p.113
• 47 "this wretched poem ... is so thin you want to wrap it up and feed it soup", p.138
• 55 "I'm no great fan of this sonnet ... I find it a bit crude and mildly hysterical ... I maintain that Wendy Cope's splendid parody ,... is the superior work, and by some distance", p.163
• 56 "A lovely, wretchedly undervalued poem on a too-little-mentioned twist in love's awful narrative", p.165
• 60 "This is a magnificient piece of verse", p.175
• 63 "This poem is without interest", p.184
• 70 "For Will, this is D-minus stuff", p.203
• 73 "justly celebrated as one of the most beautiful of the sonnets", p.210
• 93 "I'm very fond of this often overlooked sonnet", p.266
• 97 "Me and Coleridge like this one, but no-one else as far as I can make out. I wish that was paying me a compliment, but Coleridge had bloody awful taste", p.276
• 107 "its obscurity has given it undeserved prominence … a pretty average effort", p.307
• 116 "One of the most famous of all the sonnets, and even Coleridge thought this one was special", p.340
• 118 "No paraphrase can do a shred of justice to the almost inhuman cleverness of this argument, the glorious balance of the whole, its logically rigorous defence of its own irrationality, its original phrasemaking, its flawlessly pursued conceit", p.348
• 130 "God only knows why this wretched little poem is so popular", p.392
• 145 "many critics consider this poem so awful they'd like to see it excluded from the sequence", p.443
• 146 "this is a terrific poem", p.447
• 147 "Ted Hughes thought highly of this sonnet", p.456
• 152 "Would that this sequence had ended better, but in a sense it's beautifully symmetrical, having started so poorly"

As well as the views of Coleridge and Hughes, we hear from Wordsworth, who thought the Dark Lady sonnets "abominably harsh, obscure & worthless"

The typos increase later on - obligued (p.243), superblydirected (p.240), thetight (p.422), somtimes (p.459), haev (p.465)

Other Reviews

• Brandon Robshaw (The Independent)
• Hugh Thomson (The Independent)
• Daniel Swift (the Spectator)
• Christopher Rush (Herald Scotland)
• David Green
• Dove grey reader
• Robert McCrum (Guardian)

"Rain" by Don Paterson (Faber, 2009)

14 of the 29 titles begin with "The". It could have been more. He's becoming more formalist. Stanzas like the following from the "The Swing" sound rather forced.

I hung the rope up in the air and fixed the yellow seat then stood back that I might admire my handiwork complete

Maybe he's more gloomy too - death slips into many poems. Here's something from "Phantom (i.m. M.D.)" which adopts Michael Donaghy's voice, I think

Your eye is no eye but an exit wound. Mind has fired through you into the world the way a hired thug might unload his gun through the silk-lined pocket of his overcoat.

The poem ends

In making death its god the eye had lost its home in finding it. We find this everywhere the eye appears. Were there design, this would have been the flaw.

"Song for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze" has 4-line stanzas of rhyming couplets, the lines being irregularly long. Here's a stanza

I have also deduced from your staggeringly ingenious employment of some pretty basic wavetables      that unlike many of your East European counterparts, all your VST plug-ins, while not perhaps the best available      probably all have a legitimate upgrade path - indeed I imagine your entire DAW as pure as the driven snow, and not in any way buggy or virusy      which makes me love you more, demonstrating as it does an excess of virtue given your country's well-known talent for software piracy.

There's quite a lot I don't get. The first half of "The Story of the Blue Flower" seems slow to me. At the moment I think I prefer his earlier books. Online reviews include

• John Field
• Adam Newey (Guardian)
• Fiona Sampson (Independent)
• Alan Brownjohn (Sunday Times)
• Catherine Woodward (Scottish Poetry Review)
• John McCullough (Horizon Review)
• Jan Schreiber (Contemporary Poetry Review)

"Landing Light" by Don Paterson (Faber, 2003)

The entries on these pages are usually more notes than reviews, emphasising Forms and other measurable features at the expense of overview. With this book I'll practise giving a more extended coverage. It'll be messy at first but I'll tidy up later.

Let's start with the title - well, it's been used before (I used it before his book came out). It can be read domestically as "the light on the landing", aeronautically ("Landing lights are lights used on aircraft to illuminate the terrain and runway ahead during takeoff and landing" - Wikipedia), or more abstractly, suggesting a return to "land" with little (spiritual) "baggage". Several poems deal with landing or light or flights of fancy. It's an apt title.

The cover's black with Paterson's name in grey and the title in white. Again, a good choice. Inside, variety is evident - shape poems; 5-liners, 7-pagers, translations, narrow poems, prose-poems, 3 poems in Scots, and poems in various rhymed forms. He's written a book of aphorisms too. All that makes me feel that he has no need to write poems that are really just jokes or aphorisms wrapped up, or poems with gratuitous line-breaks (that said, I don't know why "'96" should take 12 lines - other than so that we can feel the width). Style and subject matter vary too, though themes emerge, as do leit-motifs - e.g. things tend to come in 12s, perhaps allusions to months or disciples, or a fairy-tale convention, or perhaps a combination of "1" and "2" - twins are a theme.

Some poems made me conscious of the Poem-Reader-Poet triangle; at their conclusion it's as if a storyteller closes their book and talks to the audience directly.

• "I post this more in testament/ than hope or warning" (St Brides: Sea-Mail)
• "It gives me no joy/ to tell you this" (A Fraud)
• "Now change your life" (Archaic Torso of Apollo)

Storytelling's another theme - not only do deathbed patients have stories to tell, but so do inanimate objects - possessed by spirits in fairy tales, or containing electronic records

Also Nature and Artifice are compared, most clearly perhaps in "St Brides: Sea-Mail" where birds are killed, dried out and made into gliders. The verses are shaped like flying saucers (or eggs?), though the indentation's function might merely be to highlight the abcdcba rhyme pattern. And where there's "Nature vs Artifice", "Feeling vs Form" isn't far away, or "Constraint vs Creativity". How does he balance these binaries? The first poem says that

   When the day comes, as the day surely must
   when it is asked of you and you refuse
   to take that lover's wound again

(a lyrical, welcoming start) you should to go to Luing - "Kilda's antithesis". St Kilda is a World Heritage Centre populated by seasonal volunteers, a military base and lots of birds. In contrast, Luing has evening classes in Tai Chi, Sewing and Patchwork, etc. It's an island, but only a partial retreat. There, you go

   to find yourself, if anything, now deeper
   in her arms than ever - sharing her breath,
   
   watching the red vans sliding silently
   between her hills

Nature may help, but so might red vans that become symbolic as soon as they're mentioned. The poem has 4-line stanzas and decasyllabled lines, but there's no rhyme or insistant meter. Then "One morning/ you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain/ the first touch of the light will finish you", and will finish the poem too.

I liked the similar balancing acts of "A Gift" (Early Muldoon?) and "The Wreck". The latter could have been disappointingly crass (relationship = shipwreck), but it works because the loosely rhymed couplets don't use the symbol too mechanically; they riff off it

• "We slung the drunk boat out of port// and watched our unreal sober life/ unmoor, a continent of grief"
• "gently hooked each other on/ like aqualungs, and thundered down// to mine one lovely secret wreck"

I like the respectful distance he maintains between the persona and the world, or the persona and words. Those distances are negotiable; he can zoom in until the distance is zero and the world and word are one, then pull back and analyse his catch. Perhaps that's why he's drawn to the longer poem - he needs room to manoeuvre, flip-flopping tenor and vehicle. Most of the longer poems couldn't be mistaken for poem sequences. I had trouble with "The Hunt", "A Fraud", "The Bandaged Shoulder", and "The Long Story". Perhaps I'm not used to the pacing, but they seem to go on a bit, small-scale word substitutions performed on plain prose in an attempt to elevate it.

   After your ninemonth in utero rehab
   you'll hit the ground running as usual, and make
   the worst of all possible starts:
   penetrating a woman - your mum, of all folk -
   with completely unreasonable force

(p.53). Though most of them have 5-beat lines, not all the longer poems have the same style. Here's a more obscure example

   Remember how it sent
   poor Louis marching underground, when all
   he needed for those ticking stalactites
   was a box of thumbtacks, gently shaken out
   in a BBC firebucket, the result
   then filtered through the educated drainpipe
   of The Great British Spring. Now that immortal coil
   has gone the way of all its noble forebears
   (from the Watkins Copycat and metal plate
   to standing very far away and shouting)

(p.72). If the Scots poems have notes why not this one too? Though I described this as obscure, the grammar is intact and it's not fractured or polyphonic. Some of the semantic challenges look as if they could be solved with Google/Bing, though "Fermier" (mentioned in "The Alexandrian Library") still puzzles me.

Several reviews are online - from the USA and India as well as the UK. Here are some extracts that caught my eye, along with my reactions

Negative

• "an unsettled collection, sequentially awkward ... and even technically rough-and-ready at times" ... "the reader might feel that ... there is actually more propulsion in these poems than there is aeroplane" ... "a book which only raises expectations for the next collection" (Richard Price)
• "while I cannot agree with the effusive mainstream encomia that his work regularly attracts, Paterson is - I have to admit - a talented poet. His range, control, diction and sound all make me wish he wasn't quite so hidebound by the current British mainstream's preferred style" (Tony Frazer, Shearsman)
• "Other poems defeat me - I end up feeling that their mysteries lie just beneath the surface, lacking only one small fact to make them plain" ... "Whenever he tries to be entertaining, Paterson becomes gauche and uncertain ... and his long-winded long poems tend to beetle off into a fabulistic realm from which there is no return." (William Logan, New Criterion) I didn't have the sense of withheld information. I thought the long poems were prolix and that sometimes there was the kind of chattering that's symptomatic of nervousness.
• "the three poems in Scots (despite the well-meaning glossary) left me cold" (Tibor Fischer, Daily Telegraph) They're the last poems I read

Neutral

• "Dante is the guiding spirit throughout Landing Light" ... "this book ... is best at desolation" (Bernard O'Donoghue, Independent) I didn't notice much desolation. There are references to Dante, but no guide or muse or middle-age crisis. Paterson's formalism and mix of subject matter echo Dante's, I suppose, but Dante had more politics, or at least more satire. The translation of Dante into rhyme quatrains (not even sharing rhymes between stanzas) isn't a popular decision
• "Paterson works within fairly tight formal constraints" (Adam Newey, Guardian)
• "Paterson often steers his poems toward small epiphanies, approached with wary patience" ... "he rarely suffers from Muldoonitis" (William Logan, New Criterion)
• "To enter the labyrinth of Paterson's poetry is to submit to a constant idea of rebirth and renewal, to succumb to the lavish ballet between dark and light, to hunt the musical corridors for the note that will take you back to a beginning. It is to come in from exile in search of the safe place you have been seeking, only to find it doesn't exist." (Tishani Doshi, Hindu Times) Birth, dark/light, (along with Dante and twins) are indeed themes, but I didn't notice any disappointed exiles, spiritual or otherwise

Positive

• "Landing Light is a magisterial work, well deserving the prizes it has won and the attention of anyone who admires well-crafted poetry" (Howard Miller, Avatar Review)
• "His poetry became known for being clever, hard, hip and gutsy. But now, it seems, he has added a whole new dimension that lifts his writing from the realms of mere technical adroitness and wit into those of a fierce compassion and empathy" (Sue Hubbard) I've not followed him closely, but I can believe this. I think it's more a change of proportions than a new ingredient
• "there's so much he does with ease and flair, it's interesting to note the little he can't do." ... "Paterson has been the best thing to happen to British poetry since Glyn Maxwell and Michael Hofmann" (William Logan, New Criterion) Hofmann's often in "Poetry" so from a US critic this is praise indeed.

In conclusion, I think this book is well worth reading - interesting even if you don't like it. Paterson has said in the past that too much poetry was being published each year in Britain. Thirty books were too many, he said. I don't know how seriously he meant this. He's also said

• "We read according to an undeclared handicap system, to the specific needs of the author. We meet the novelists a little way, the poets at least halfway, the translated poets three-quarters of the way; the Postmoderns we pick up at the station in their wheelchairs."
• "To my mind [workshops] represent the infantilisation of a perfectly serious subject and are mostly a waste of time"

This book might well qualify to be amongst the year's survivors. Readers won't often need to bring a wheelchair. Nor will they waste their time.