Of the various myths and allusions decorating Don Paterson’s second collection, two seem more pertinent than the rest, and both involve beheading. The Orpheus story is employed as a metaphor for the retrieval of dark secrets – “his head cancelled utterly as he dives into himself… dredging the dark underworld for mysteries small enough to carry back, concealed and intact, in his mouth”, though elsewhere the song itself is abolished – “the sudden, immaculate, irrevocable disappearance of both the singer and the song seemed such a terrifying thing…. I can still see his terrible grin.”
The other famous decapitee is Scheherazade, and Paterson’s vicious riffs on this theme (or “head” as a dialect poem resonantly terms it) involve the girl’s execution: “nearby her upturned hostess trolley / lies the headless body of Sheherezade / whose stories would not tally; besides / I had heard the last already”. As its title and these examples suggest, God’s Gift to Women is a book which plays obsessively with the vatic delivery of narrative or fiction (“A poem is a little church, remember, / you, its congregation, I, its cantor”), while carefully erasing its purpose, significance and veracity as it goes on. That “terrible grin” which remains, Cheshire-cat fashion, after all meaning has been effaced, is the endpoint of a text which aspires to the anarchic.
The “Notes”, which do not quite end the volume, and which (by accident or design?) are not in the right order, assure us that “some of the poems take their titles from the stations of the old Dundee-Newtyle railway”. The first of these nine titles is numbered “(i)” but is otherwise a blank page; the last is numbered “(ix)”, but falls among the endpapers and is (deliberately) not listed in the contents pages. The seven station poems dotted through the volume do not bear the numbers ii–vii; they bear times of day, and are not in chronological order. Whether this matters or not is a question left to the reader.
The final piece – the marooned “destination” of “(ix) 02:50: Newtyle” – reads “Of this white page ask no more sense / than of the skies (though you may believe / the rain His tears, the wind His grief, / the snow His shredded evidence”, and stops, mid-sentence, mid-parenthesis, mid-everything. Paterson places that statement of nihilism “hors-texte”, eliminating God, authority, significance. The rest of the volume, however, places Paterson in the role of that absent God – the cantor, that conduit of word and song, supplants their author. Paterson, arguably, is playing God in this volume, and not only in the title-poem, a slightly incoherent and unsettling account of brutalized lovers in which an act of authorial omnipotence provides the fairy-tale ending which the rest of the volume despises and eschews.
God’s Gift to Women is a collection of elegantly written and often amusing pieces, but the overarching themes – and the overarching denial of any theme – seem grafted on. There are echoes throughout, between poems and even between this volume and his first, but it is hard to be convinced that these are functional rather than ornamental; and the sniggering hints throughout that even to look for connection is a duff endeavour make one less inclined to persist. Thus “(iv) 21:00 Baldragon” is an elliptical triptych which ends with an envoi – “Here is wisdom: explain to me if you can, / The parable concerning the three brothers.” Until such sagacious explanation is furnished or arrived at, it is easier perhaps to view the poem as a sceptical comment on parables, polysemy and the urge to interpret; either that or Paterson has misjudged how oblique a poet can be before the flock get lost.
The volume contains as many doppelgänger as his first collection, Nil Nil (1993), and images of doubling and reflection are played on in postmodern fashion throughout; but much is what Peter Reading once described as “literary techniques for tiny tots, part one”, and in a sense postmodernism of this sort seems faintly old-fashioned these days. Paterson even offers a Borges-style sequel to the Alexandrian library poem in his first volume – is the poet in a train or a library and who is dreaming who? – which in style recalls Sean O’Brien too strongly, and thus reminds one that O’Brien’s own poems about both trains and libraries are harnessed to a clear but sophisticated politics missing from this playful volume.
Don Paterson writes with an enviable grasp of tone, form, phrasing; the volume offers these qualities clearly. Yet somehow – and it is hard to believe that someone capable of all that cannot have realized this – there is an edge of smug contempt and self-indulgence which can be repelling. The construction of the volume as a whole – with faked epigraphs and knowing reflexivity – offers images which can be too easily turned against the material. The poem titled “Postmodern” is the tale of a pornographic movie in which the image of its masturbating owner is superimposed on videotaped videotape. “Dye no’ get it? Will Eh hae tae explain it tae ye?” No, no. Excellent though Paterson can be, this volume wastes itself in play and disguise; the emotion evident in his first collection awaits effective mediation.