Nil Nil

"Whatever I do with all the black is my business alone"Something of a very British life ..lemonade bottles, vinyl grooves, taxi ranks in the rain, high tower blocks. A nightshift somewhere clocking on in grey and a life lived in minor chords. What can't be said directly can be shown, and felt..a sense of slow failure we've all had at one 4am or another. Heavy eyes in a winter dawn that never quite becomes a day. Empty provincial train platforms, fumbling love in small hotels (in the shadow of Larkin), the moments in between captured like a 70s Polaroid..over exposed, too vivid..Dundee, Largs, Laphroaig (taste the peat smoke), slow cafe meditations on being a son, failing as a father, music, loss and verse itself.A disturbing end of century blues.

Don Paterson's first book of poems contains the seeds for the rest of his career, but in flawed terms; his usual embarassed erudition he here protests too much, and his versions or pseudo-translations (here after Rimbaud and Jorn-Erik Berglund) have far to go to his versions of Rilke's Sonnets to Oprheus and his 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' in Landing Light. It does, however, include the first (and best) part of the Alexandrian Library, continued in later collections God's Gift to Women and Landing Light. It's an obvious first collection, but it's still Don Paterson's first collection. Buy it, you fool.

It's not surprising there are so few reviews here for a man who's probably the UK's best living poet. George Orwell reminded us in the 1940s that poetry is seen by most as the preserve of a refined and out-of-touch elite with more time on their hands than they sensibly know what to do with - i.e. verse is associated, rightly or wrongly, with an effete, leisured class with no need to turn its collective hand to 'proper' work, like the abominable Bloomsbury set. But there's nothing effete, refined or out-of-touch about Paterson's work, evoking Ted Hughes at one point - Mooncalf - and Philip Larkin at another, shades of Mr Bleaney in Bedfellows, for example. DP is also a master of the sonnet and I'd wager anyone a pint of Guinness that Heliographer is as technically accomplished and evocative as anything Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney or John Donne did with the form in the 16th century, or ee cummings in the early 20th. Look, you get barrels of solid drinking culture, lyrical musings on sunset over the lake and, best of all, the joy of playing football as a small boy with loads of your mates in a poem mirroring the ebb and flow of keen young hoofers chasing the ball en masse up and down makeshift pitches - Nil Nil. I concede there are flaws here (NB scholarly critical rebuke in traditional fashion) but let's remember it was a first collection, and DP has gone on to fulfil amply the promise glowing in these pages. And The Ferryman's Arms..? Yep, I've been in that pub, with its humming pool table, and set up a frame with myself... which I lost on the black.

Over-rated. Terribly so.

Better than 'God's Gift to Women'; not as good as 'Landing Light'. Sometimes I have no idea what he's going on about, though whatever he says he says beautifully.