40 Sonnets
About this book
This new collection from Don Paterson, his first since the Forward prize-winning
Rain in 2009, is a series of forty sonnets. Some take a more traditional form, some are highly experimental, but what these poems share is a lyrical intelligence and musical gift that has been visible in his work since his first book of poems,
Nil Nil, in 2009.
Addressed to children, friends and enemies, the living and the dead, musicians, poets and dogs, these poems display an ambition in their scope and tonal range matched by the breadth of their concerns. Here, voices call home from the blackout and the airlock, the storm cave and the séance, the coalshed, the war, the ringroad, the forest and the sea. These are voices frustrated by distance, by shot glass and bar rail, by the dark, leaving the 'sound that fades up from the hiss, / like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing, / now full of its only note, its lonely call . . .'
In
40 Poems Paterson returns to some of his central themes - contradiction and strangeness, tension and transformation, the dream world, and the divided self - in some of the most powerful and formally assured poems he has written to date. This is a rich and accomplished new work from one of the foremost poets writing in English today.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Landing Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- Epigraph
- Here
- Wave
- The Air
- The Eye
- A Pocket Horizon
- Radka Toneff
- The Six
- âHouseâ
- The Big Listener
- A Powercut
- The Self-Illuminated
- Funeral Prayer
- At the Perty
- Lacrima
- Francesca Woodman
- Two
- A Vow
- A Threshold
- The Foot
- Seven Questions about the Journey
- Fit
- The Version
- The Fable of the Open Book
- To Dundee City Council
- An Incarnation
- Requests
- For a Drowned Poet
- Le Joueur dâĂchecs
- A Scholar
- Little Aster
- Shutter
- Apsinthion
- Nostalgia
- A Calling
- Sentinel
- On Woodmanâs Photography
- Séance
- Souls
- Mercies
- The Roundabout
- About the Author
- By the Same Author
- Copyright
