Don Paterson - Rain

Don Paterson, Rain (Faber)

It doesn't seem like six years since Landing Light, Don Paterson's last book. Having thought his earlier books quite stylish and successful, I bought that expecting it to be the maturer, finished poet and a major book of poems. But whether it was my fault or that of the poems, I didn't find it so. Accomplished, sophisticated and all those things perhaps but not a book I returned to or thought about afterwards. So, in anticipation of the new book, I had another look and it still didn't do much for me.
The new book features a tribute in serveral parts to Michael Donaghy, to whose eminent position as critic's favourite Paterson might be regarded as a natural inheritor. It's allusive, personal, deep and meaningful but probably not worthy of its challeging remit. Some of the rhymed poems about his young sons are effective without being groundbreaking while other rhyming poems don't seem to suit him very well. It was beginning to look as if Paterson simply wasn't for me. Until I read the poem called The Day and then read it again to make sure. It is strange to find among a collection of poems that you don't particularly like one of the best new poems you've read for quite some time.
It 'plays with' the ideas of intimacy and the infinite, the one within the other, separateness within a relationship,
even in our own small galaxy
there is another town whose today-light
won't reach a night of ours till Kirriemuir
is nothing but a vein of hematite

is a beautiful and compact lesson in quantum physics. But then even though,

They talk...and decide
to set apart one minute of the day
to dream across the parsecs, the abyss,
a kind of cosmic solidarity.

it is still possible to feel that,
'You're saying that because
the bed's a light-year wide, or might as well be,
I'm even lonelier than I thought I was?'

And so the somewhat tragic miracle of love and finding each other, which might be a bit of a 'commonplace' but the poem's even self aware enough to know that, is profoundly expressed. In fact, for me, it makes the book worth buying on its own.
Once encouraged to take a more generous view of the poet, you notice that the title poem is a fine thing, too, and Why Do You Stay Up So Late? starts to look like a better poem.
However, there is a series of 35 renku, more gnomic utterances in faux-Japanese style that ideally would be forbidden in English poetry and a rather unhilarious blank page of transcendental zen poetry called Unfold i.m. Akira Yoshizawa. However apt a tribute it is to Yoshizawa, it is hardly a new idea. Len Shackleton, the 'clown prince' of football had a chapter in his biography entitled (something like) What the Average Chairman Knows About Football and I reckon that was four decades ago. The joke hasn't got any funnier since then.
So, with so much of this book so far short of the high standard required to be so, I can't see Paterson as the natural heir to Donaghy. It would be a better book if half of it had been left out but it provides a handful of perfectly fine poems and one that, for me, is exemplary.