Don Paterson

A classic of its kind. - William Boyd Thought-provoking, hilarious, sardonic and scarily brilliant. - Scotsman A work of dazzling craft. - Times Literary Supplement A memoir in a million. - Sunday Times Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He spent his boyhood on a council housing estate. When he wasn't busy dreading his birthdays, dodging kids...

Shakespeare's Sonnets are as important and vital today as they were when first published four hundred years ago. Perhaps no collection of verse before or since has so captured the imagination of readers and lovers; certainly no poem has come under such intense critical scrutiny, and presented the reader with such a bewildering number of alternative interpretations. In this illuminating...

Poets have been fascinated and challenged by the sonnet ever since it was imported from Italy to England in the sixteenth century. With its fourteen lines, inexhaustibly variable, it has met the particular needs of almost every major poet from Thomas Wyatt to Paul Muldoon. Don Paterson, himself an adept of the form, has devised an anthology that is both...

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 simultaneously offer some protection against them....

Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963 and spent his boyhood living on a working-class council housing estate. Toy Fights is the remarkable story of his first twenty years. This is not just a book about music and family, but also about 'schizophrenia, hell, money, narcissists, debt and the working class, anger, swearing, drugs, books, football, love, origami,...

The Poem attempts to answer several questions: what is a poem? In what way is its use of language distinct? What conditions allow it to arise, and what is its cultural purpose? And how, exactly, do poems work? Part polemic, part technical treatise and part meditation, The Poem is an ambitious contemporary ars poetica. Paterson looks at the writing, transmission...