Impulse and Design: John McCullough on Don Paterson’s Rain

Don Paterson, Rain, Faber 2009, hardback, £12.99

Six years after Landing Light cemented Don Paterson’s reputation as one of the most successful writers of his generation, the darkly erudite poet returns with his fourth collection. Like its predecessor, the much-anticipated Rain is a book full of surprises. Where the earlier book wrong-footed readers with unexpectedly intimate and tender poems to his sons, however, the shift this time is as much technical as it is to do with content.

Paterson’s formal poems have been noted for their ingenious rhymes which create sparks not only from their rubbing together of unlikely partners but the deeper connections between the two halves he nudges his reader to see as a result. ‘Seed’, an early poem on the Oedipal predicament of self-sacrificing parents, locked ‘murder’ to ‘martyr’, ‘life’ to ‘thief’. His new collection though sees an increased proportion of unashamedly full rhymes. Poems like ‘The Circle’, ‘Two Trees’ and the title piece use cleanly rhymed iambic couplets almost exclusively which complement his Zen-like, everything-is-in-everything-else perspective in fresh ways. As well as mitigating his bleak backdrops with playful artifice, they add an inviting — if deceptive — smoothness to the surface of conceptual territory where speakers

… trust to Krishna or to fate
to keep our arrows halfway straight.
But the target also draws our aim —
our will and nature’s are the same
                                     (‘The Circle’)

This book is closer in style and outlook to American formalists such as Robert Frost, Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur than early influences like Paul Muldoon and Jorge Luis Borges — even if the opener with its teasing assertion that ‘trees are all this poem is about’ still flirts with readerly expectations and yearnings. The writing here often feels unnervingly naked for all of Paterson’s metapoetic defences; philosophical concerns are often addressed in the same concise, head-on manner as parental ones. The majority of the poems also steer clear of the obscure words formerly dug out by a self-confessed dictionary addict. There is a preference instead for plainer, more honest-seeming verbs, for the knowingly timed flat line and disarmingly simple yet revealing comparisons:

so for all that we are one machine
ploughing through the sea and gale
I know your impulse and design
no better than the keel the sail
                                       (‘Motive’)

There is a subtle disturbance to the pattern of alternately stressed syllables in that trochaic ‘ploughing’. Teamed with the plosive, it unexpectedly jerks the reader to make the forward motion of the ‘machine’ feel like an especially determined push against the storm-lashed ocean. Such tiny, considered disruptions are legion and expose the meticulous craft that underlies the graceful flow of his music. Similarly, where shifts from full to pararhymes or vice versa are deployed, they often operate like trapdoors, dropping the reader suddenly out of a dream of reality dictated by culture and the limitations of the human lifespan and senses. The book’s closing line is a good example, serving not to tidily wind things up but to alert the reader to a starkly different way of looking at the transient world around us:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood —
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.
                                                     (‘Rain’)

Nonetheless, as one might expect from a writer who has expressed his impatience with the notion of a consistent voice outside of specific poems, there is a diverse range of other strategies. ‘Song for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze’, winner of last year’s Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, marries the energy of longer, more colloquial lines to the textured vocabularies of electro music, sexual desire and computing: ‘I would have all your plug-ins run in real-time, in the blameless zero-latency heaven of the 32-bit floating-point environment’. (Unlike some contemporary poets, Paterson is fluent in new technology and the connoisseur’s end of popular culture — a recent interview revealed a cat named after Battlestar Galactica’s Caprica Six.) The sequence ‘Renku: My Last Thirty-Five Deaths’ calls to mind his collection of aphorisms, The Book of Shadows, in its compression and intellectual verve: ‘Born man, die god. / What hell would fashion / such a fraud?’ There are returns to earlier territory, too, with longer narratives like ‘The Bathysphere’, the critic-baiting blank poem ‘Unfold’, gentle and often troubled pieces which centre on his children and versions of lyric poems by writers including his old favourites Antonio Machado and C. P. Cavafy.

Unavoidably, there is also a questing directness in ‘Phantom’, a seven-part elegy in blank verse for long-time friend, Michael Donaghy. Here, Paterson’s philosophical assertion that ‘We are ourselves the void in contemplation’ is played out as his fellow poet speaks first of the creation of the self, the soul and the idea of death before conjuring the humour and kindness that marked the life of a man who made ‘knee-jerk apologies / to every lampstand that I blundered into.’ The transition is startling and yet oddly fitting when one thinks of the logical gymnastics of Donaghy’s own verse. Ultimately, however, the sequence turns to the unsettling questions that underpin any poem of remembrance: to what extent does the elegist’s desire for an imaginative, well-crafted piece inevitably come into conflict with the human need to commemorate, simply and without cunning? Is there any act of writing entirely devoid of ego? Paterson is too assiduous a writer to trust in unmediated self-expression and Donaghy’s ghost is not present merely to comfort the speaker with sweet recollections:

what kind of twisted ape ends up believing
the rushlight of his little human art
truer than the great sun on his back?
I knew the game was up for me the day
I stood before my father’s corpse and thought
If I can’t get a poem out of this …
Did you think any differently with mine?

Resisting any easy consolations, ‘Phantom’ feels for all its immaculate metrical caging to be as close as we shall get to a raw articulation of pain from such a perfectionist — albeit one spurred as much by cynicism about poetic motives as the loss of a friend. Indeed, the jolting line break and white space after ‘believing’ lead this scepticism about writers to spiral out to contaminate all acts of faith — including the reader’s willingness to suspend their disbelief about the reality and sincerity of the speaker Paterson has constructed. The poem’s true subject is the impossibility of its own ostensible elegiac project, the refusal of its language to be transparent. Nevertheless, the urgent pace and self-lacerating jumps between metaphysics, intimacy and black humour that result give it the paradoxical feel of a poem that blazed itself into existence, that needed in its own tainted way to be written. It ranks amongst his best.

Paterson is for many one of the most important poets writing in English, a ruthlessly intelligent writer who refuses to eschew musicality or necessary difficulty for the sake of fashion or populism. This eclectic, inventive and highly moving collection will only further his standing.