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    Rain: Poems
    Rain: Poems
    Rain: Poems
    Ebook67 pages50 minutes

    Rain: Poems

    By Don Paterson

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    About this ebook

    In this, his first volume of original verse since the award-winning Landing Light, Don Paterson is found writing at his most memorable and direct. In an assembly of masterful lyrics and monologues, he conjures a series of fables and charms that serve both to expose us to the unsettling forces within the world and to offer some protection against them. Whether outwardly elemental in their address or more personal in their direction, these poems—addressed to the rain and the sea, to his young sons or beloved friends—never shy from their inquiry into truth and lie, embracing everything in scope from the rangy narrative to the tiny renku. Rain, which includes the winner of this year's Forward Prize for the Best Individual Poem and an extended elegy for the poet Michael Donaghy, is Paterson's most intimate and manifest collection to date.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781466880689
    Rain: Poems
    Author

    Don Paterson

    Don Paterson has written several collections of poems, including Nil Nil, God’s Gift to Women, The Eyes, Rain, and Landing Light, which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland.

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    • 2/5
      A bit too fond of platitude, and a bit too formalist in structure (particularly with regards rhyme scheme, where he shows a strong love of rhyming couplets that most frequently works, in my opinion, to the poems' detriment). A handful of enjoyable works, but overall not to my taste.And, as a computer person, the Forward Prize-winning "Love Poem for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze", was simply painful.

    Book preview

    Rain - Don Paterson

    Two Trees

    One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed

    with one idea rooted in his head:

    to graft his orange to his lemon tree.

    It took him the whole day to work them free,

    lay open their sides, and lash them tight.

    For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright

    they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared

    two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years

    the limbs would get themselves so tangled up

    each bough looked like it gave a double crop,

    and not one kid in the village didn’t know

    the magic tree in Miguel’s patio.

    The man who bought the house had had no dream

    so who can say what dark malicious whim

    led him to take his axe and split the bole

    along its fused seam, then dig two holes.

    And no, they did not die from

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