The first poem in Don Paterson’s latest collection, Rain, ends: “They were / trees, and trees don’t weep or ache or / shout. / And trees are all this poem is about”. The last ends: “and none of this, none of this / matters”. One of Paterson’s most frequent manoeuvres is this sort of denial; to assert vigorously that something is unimportant in order to show that it does matter to him, but that it matters so much that he can’t say so directly. Translating Robert Desnos’s “Chant du Ciel”, Paterson tellingly renders “elle est émouvante” as “I can hardly speak of it”.
Rain is an extended elegy for its dedicatee, Paterson’s friend Michael Donaghy; or rather, an extended struggle to write such an elegy. That first poem, “Trees”, is on the face of it a whimsical little faux-Spanish fable in which a “Don Miguel” successfully grafts together two fruit trees, which are later separated in what is so clearly an allegory that the poet has to issue the denial quoted above. That the gardener’s name grafts together “Don” and “Michael” is no coincidence. Later a translation of César Vallejo’s “Miguel” is deployed to equally pointed effect. Long before the penultimate poem, “Phantom”, an overt elegy in which the dead man seems to speak to his grieving friend, that grief has been carefully, covertly mediated in several pieces.
This performance of evasion and reticence is a hallmark of Paterson’s poetry. His four volumes of original poetry, and his two volumes of pastiche aphorisms, are replete with references to shame and guilt, and waver constantly between concealing and revealing their anxieties about sex, class, power and status. Sean O’Brien has written that “a significant part of [Paterson’s] work involves a process of attempted self-cancellation”, and O’Brien reads this, sympathetically, as evidence of a pure artistic temperament. Yet Paterson’s work more often emphasizes and advertises that desire for self-cancellation; so what one is left with is precisely the unhappy ego from which the poem is ostensibly (and sometimes ostentatiously) trying to escape.
The blurb for Rain is eager to emphasize its autobiographical content, describing it as Paterson’s “most intimate and candid book to date”. Actually, the aphoristic books, The Book of Shadows and The Blind Eye, are if anything more revealing, offering slightly spiteful sexual reminiscences, confessions of insecurity and jealousy, ruthless portraits of the literary world’s pettier enmities and anxieties, and a pervasive sense of (paradoxically competitive and boastful) self-disgust (“I no longer fantasise about being caught … I am disappointed in me enough for everyone”; “if I do not constantly evince an attitude of self-disgust, it’s due to nothing more than a lack of stamina”, etc, etc, etc). There’s a lot of humour, but it is frequently founded on, and sometimes overpowered by, considerable sadness and hatred, as if poetry and sex were little more than territorial tussles over a few inches of scorched earth.
Nonetheless, even in those books, revelation is still offset by defensive techniques of concealment – the reader (and especially the reviewer or critic) finds that their reactions are anticipated, priced in, explained away; besides, Paterson, like the good musician he is, can always suggest that he doesn’t really mean it. (He evidently means some of it, since two separate “aphorisms” are refashioned into one of his new poems, “The Error”, and others have also been proudly recycled in different contexts.) But the pieces are deliberately fleeting and mobile, calculatedly evading responsibility: just when the reader might be tiring of Paterson’s high-handed assertions, he puts himself down and performs a pratfall; and at a point where the over-italicized monotony of his misanthropic pronouncements wears thin, he admits himself that “they all sound as if they were delivered by the same disenfranchised, bad-tempered minor deity”. The accumulated contradictions almost cancel each other out: by the end of The Book of Shadows, his aphorisms disdain the aphorism, and the collection attacks the act of collection.
In his own poems, Paterson’s shadow-play of misanthropy and self-disgust is performed with more subtlety, with the style and control that have made him the leading light in his own poetic circle. The ludic aspects of the early volumes, which never seemed wholly convincing, have been mostly abandoned for a quieter, more conventional lyricism. The issue of class has receded over time, and is only overt in “An Elliptical Stylus” from Nil Nil, though it is a recurrent theme in the prose; but the existential and sexual preening, disappointment, remorse and self-pity are continuous. The treatment of misogyny in God’s Gift to Women, and elsewhere, is unsettlingly acute. And one day, no doubt, a hapless Balokowsky-like student will trace Paterson’s treatment of mothers and the maternal through the poems, and note how often the figure of the Mother is either erased or associated with death.
Throughout the poems, doppelgängers, twins, and lost, miscarried or contraceived children abound, haunting or hunted, often suggestive of a repressed if unexplained guilt. From the opening poem of Nil Nil, where the narrator plays pool against his satanic double, these motifs have been deployed again and again. In Rain, there is a creepy little poem, “The Lie”, in which the narrator has been keeping something ghastly locked up in his psychic basement for decades; in Landing Light, we had “The Hunt”, where the narrator pursues an ancient rival to an underground room, only to find that he is staring at a mirror.
In “The Circle”, from the latest volume, Paterson adds a refinement to his trademark image of a man disturbingly divided; his son corrects one trembling hand with its steadier twin, and Paterson comments:
the whole man must be his own brother
for no man is himself alone
though some of us have never known
the one hand’s kindness to the other
There do seem to be two Patersons, each embarrassed by and ashamed of the other: the mystical poet-philosopher, essaying gnomic profundities; and the proudly self-loathing nihilist, delivering the belittling gags and jibes. The danger, as in any economy, is too much inflation or deflation. In “Phantom” Paterson makes the shade of Donaghy offer him this convenient advice: “do this for me: / just plot a course / between the Orphic oak / and fuck ’em all if they can’t take a joke / and stick to it”.
In “Phantom”, though, the steering is all awry. The philosophical passages achieve only a windy banality: “We come from nothing and return to it. / It lends us out to time, and when we lie / in silent contemplation of the void / they say we feel it contemplating us …”. The poem is overlong, and often strains for effect:
I might have you read these words
on a black moon, in a forest after midnight
a thousand miles from anywhere your plea
for hearth or water might be understood
and have you strike one match, and then another –
not to light these rooms, or to augment
what little light they shed upon themselves
but to see the kind of dark I laid between them.
One recalls, unkindly, Nigel Tufnel in This Is Spinal Tap: “It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black”.
Despite the strenuous darkness, there are several interesting and enjoyable pieces in the volume: Paterson’s formal range and fluency are amply in evidence. The poems about his children, as in Landing Light, are unfailingly simple, beautiful and affecting. The jeux d’esprit include a series of terminal renku (“Aha! The zip / for that idiot suit. / And inside? Zip!”), a McGonagallesque love poem for a Georgian electronic musician, and a cute and appropriate elegy for Akira Yoshizawa, the origami genius: titled “Unfold” it is an otherwise blank piece of paper. The most effective elegy, though, is one of those for Michael Donaghy. It directly precedes “Phantom” and makes it otiose. A single quatrain, “Verse” is a pithy confession of impotence, and an unusually direct admission of a debt:
He’s three year deid, an aa I’ve done is greet
wi a toom pen an nae elegy but och.
I’ve jist nae hert to mak a poem o it.
I stole that line from Robert Garioch.