Don Paterson

1 4 1 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R Don Paterson’s new prose work is learned, intensely reflective, shot through with illuminating perceptions – and sometimes baf- fling and sometimes maddening. To be all of these, as well as crotchety and cavalier, it has to be at least substantial, and in fact it is imposing, even daunting, in its 698 pages (before the bibliography ). Concerned with fundamentals yet original and recherché, sweeping in its proclamations yet detailed down to the conceptual curlicue, it recalls tomes as di√erent from it and each other as, say, Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend’s Hamlet’s Mill, and Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. If it were architecture The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre would be a folly, a fabrique. It is an eccentric monument, a rogue product of vision, compulsion, and superabundant energy. Oddly, it is written by an excellent poet who as a poet prefers economy and precision to elaboration and opalescence. His poems embody a version of a late, high plain style more at home today in T h e P o e m : L y r i c , S i g n , M e t r e , b y D o n P a t e r s o n ( Fa b e r a n d Fa b e r , 7 5 2 p p . , $ 3 5 ) 1 4 2 Y E N S E R Y a British than an American literary context. To an American, he sometimes recalls Frost, and Yvor Winters and his cohort, but he has a flair for the aleatory, and while Frost himself likes to undermine and enigmatize his forthrightness, Paterson often features that predilection. Younger American poets who venerate Howard Nemerov and Donald Justice will respond to his verse, which is prosodically polished, shrewd, and rarely predictable. Straight up with a twist. For an instance of Paterson’s brachylogy, take this brief but freighted lyric from his collection Landing Light, winner of both the Whitbread Poetry Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2003. It opens with a glance at Hadrian’s ‘‘Animula’’ and reminds us fleetingly of Catullus 85 (with its own paradox fixed in the word ‘‘excrucior’’) but flies free of both: Sliding on Loch Ogil Remember, brother soul, that day spent cleaving nothing from nothing, like a thrown knife – then there was no arriving and no leaving, just a dream of the disintricated life – crucified and free, the still man moving, the balancing his work, the wind his wife. ‘‘Disintricated’’: at the heart of this deftly tied knot, it is the exact word, undercut immediately by ‘‘crucified,’’ and then by the whole of the last two lines, with their counterweights, themselves reinscribed in the woven rhymes and their resonance, starting with the perfectly double-edged ‘‘cleaving.’’ One could derive from this laudably laden poem – one of a number that could represent his best – the major desiderata that emerge in The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre. The reader interested in convening Paterson’s poems and theory might push o√ from his remarks in part 1, titled ‘‘Lyric,’’ on contranyms , or what he knows as ‘‘auto-antonyms such as ‘cleave,’’’ whose contrary meanings’ coincidence with their phonological identity ‘‘will inevitably leave, in the mouth of the English speaker, the strange aftertaste of paradox.’’ As it happens, Paterson is one of several poets in the past couple of decades to have opened up this compact word. Unlike many of its cousins – ‘‘pall,’’ for instance, and ‘‘fast’’ – ‘‘cleave’’ has contrary senses (‘‘to hold’’ and ‘‘to cut’’) P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 4 3 R that come from separate etyms. It is possible, however, that all words began as ‘‘enantiosemes’’ (to borrow Roland Barthes’s coinage ) that harbored their antitheses at the outset and depended on context to determine their nonce meanings. The groundbreaking study, less known than it might be despite Freud...