Rain: Poems

Don Paterson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sep 9, 2014 - Poetry - 80 pages

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.

Contents

• Two Trees: 3
• The Error: 4
• For Once: 5
• The Swing: 6
• The Handspring: 8
• Why Do You Stay Up So Late?: 9
• The Circle: 10
• The Rain at Sea: 12
• The Human Sheld: 14
• The Lie: 15
• Correctives: 16
• Song for Natalie Tusja Beridze: 17
• My Last Thirtyfive Deaths: 22
• Unfold: 31
• The Bathysphere: 33
• The Story of the Blue Flower: 36
• Parallax: 38
• Motive: 39
• The Day: 40
• The Poetry: 43
• Sky Song: 44
• March Wind: 45
• The Wind: 46
• The Landscape: 47
• The BowlMaker: 48
• Miguel: 49
• Verse: 50
• Phantom: 51
• Rain: 60

About the author

Don Paterson has written four previous collections of poems: Nil Nil, God's Gift to Women, The Eyes, and Landing Light, which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Rain: Poems
• Author: Don Paterson
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014
• ISBN: 1466880686, 9781466880689
• Length: 80 pages
• Subjects: Poetry / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh