The White Lie: New and Selected Poetry - Softcover

Paterson, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555973531 ISBN 13: 9781555973537

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2001

Synopsis

A rising star in the United Kingdom, contemporary Scottish poet Paterson is poised to become a major voice of our time. The London Review of Books calls him "one of the most talented Scottish writers of the new generation." The White Lie is the first and only American selection of Paterson's lyric and urbane poems.

About this title

About the Author

Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1963. His poetry collections include Nil Nil, God's Gift to Women, and The Eyes. Paterson has been the recipient of several literary awards and prizes, including the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is currently Poetry Editor at Picador (U.K.) and divides his time between Edinburgh and Kirriemuir, Scotland. Paterson is also a jazz guitarist and has recorded many albums with his band, The Lammas.

From Publishers Weekly

aterson's insouciant bad-boy riffs, quickly told stories and fluent rhymes have made him a hit in Britain: the Scottish writer and jazz guitarist hits these shores with this wildly uneven, sometimes striking, U.S. debut. The collection opens with short, anecdotal poems from Nil Nil, the early-'90s book that made his name. As with his peers Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage, Paterson's skewed sonnets and shaggy-dog stanzas owe plenty to Paul Muldoon: Paterson distinguished his early poems through their laddish subjects, rhyming "blunt" with a ruder word in a poem about "an ancient, beat-up Phillips turntable." "Prologue" (from his second U.K. book, God's Gift to Women) seeks "that sunless pit of rancour and alarm/ where language finds its least prestigious form"; its couplets introduce disturbing poems about sex, drugs, soccer and Scotland (especially sex). The most effective of the lot begins by quoting a partner ("Is it normal to get this wet?") and ends with a striking visual memory: "the night we lay down on the flag of surrender/ and woke on the flag of Japan." Paterson's desire to capture hip lingo can clash, sometimes fruitfully, with his interests in loneliness and in dreams, notably in a lengthy two-part poem that likens a musty used bookstore to the Library of Alexandria. Paterson's latest work seems less distinctive: adapting Eastern Europeans or crafting descriptive filigree, he seems in search of a new, more mature approach. At his best, Paterson shows a young man trying to understand himself, his language, his id and his urban surroundings: readers who want to check out British poetry's recent populist turn could do a lot worse, but some readers may find these "white lie[s]" and hetero musings rather unamusing.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1555973531
• ISBN 13: 9781555973537
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120