POETRY
Dreaming the disintricated life
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`Landing Light is Paterson's most evocative work yet; spiritual, vigorously sensual...'
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THE Scottish poet Don Paterson's Landing Light is an extraordinary collection of verse for two reasons. The first, and the more obvious one, is that it has drawn high praise from every echelon of the British literati, winning both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Prize for poetry this year. The other is that, in spite of the ladish aura which has been assiduously cultivated around him, Landing Light is Paterson's most evocative work yet; spiritual, vigorously sensual, and mercifully far removed from beer, trains, and football.
To enter the labyrinth of Paterson's poetry is to submit to a constant idea of rebirth and renewal, to succumb to the lavish ballet between dark and light, to hunt the musical corridors for the note that will take you back to a beginning. It is to come in from exile in search of the safe place you have been seeking, only to find it doesn't exist.
Areas of understanding
There are multiple levels in his world; crossing points of transition, underworld bridges, a forest of suicides; places of indeterminate nature, caught between shades of dusk and dawn, because Paterson would have us believe that these are the only true areas of understanding. Books, wellheads, and trees not only deign to speak, but instruct with a Zen koan-like declaration: What do you call the opposite of epiphany? And as we meander through his paths of scrub and undergrowth, trying to wriggle the sense of desolation off our shoulders, hoping for a wee bit of enlightenment, we realise, at some twilight point, like Paterson, that the fight is against reduction, against becoming "fewer". And that ultimately, to harbour any "dream of a disintricated life," will involve having to move and keep still at the same time.
There are no "easy" poems in this collection. Paterson's language is carefully guided through conduits, bound by parameters of rigorous meter and rhyme, pitched to perfection. But the simplest, most startling poems are those addressed to his four-year-old son and to his unborn twins. Here, there is a surprisingly raw reverence for the feminine, a resonant plea coming from some opaque place the poet cannot name: Change your life, honour your lover, see how the true gift never leaves the giver.
Hard-won poetry
No reader alive is going to believe that the poems come easily to him, or that the muse is transferring all this osmotically through his fingertips. This is not exuberant poetry. It does not sprawl or dance across the page; there are no dizzy escalations or sudden wild drops. The places of ascent or descent are reached by means of stairways. There are steps, gaps, transcendent landings, between which, and upon where, small discoveries are waiting to be made. "I believe in poems, not poets," says Paterson, "So sod the individual voice. All true poems are fugitive anyway. They're too good for their authors."
Not all poets though, may be as good to their poems as Paterson, who admits to averaging 50 drafts per poem. He likens the poetical process to a love affair, where, by the end of it, "Me and the poem are scrapping over the trolley in Sainsbury's about whether to get white or pink bog roll, we haven't slept together for a month, and I know that pretty soon it'll be time for us to go our separate ways." Eventually though, as Paterson has rightly said, "There are only ever love poems."
Love is blood in this collection. It courses through: unmooring, disengaging, unhinging, leaving, returning, letting us down, lifting us up, and leaving again. "It is not the lover that we love, but love/ itself," he writes, and later, "it kills us to keep love/ kills us to give it away." Love cannot be something we share, it is something we get down to after "our lover mercifully departs/ and lets us get back to the business of love again." Paterson's love commands that we look deep into the objects that give shape to things: shadow, mirror, glass. It knows that to speak too early on in love can empty us, that for love to "blast straight through our skin," we must allow it into our private dark.
Bitter light
Much like the Zen koans used by Buddhist teachers to facilitate disciples into reaching a state of enlightenment, Paterson's enigmatic poems steer away from the idea of "solution," and celebrate the "awakening", or the "knowing". But Paterson is sceptical of the uncomplicated luminosity of most mythic beliefs, whether eastern or western, where the experiences of light have always gone hand in hand with spiritual rebirth, where illumination has been on par with transformation. Paterson's light is bitter, harsh, divisive, exposing; calling on you to change that which you cannot. His bid, instead, is to make sense of the darkness, because light will not save: it is an obstacle between us and our enlightenment. The uncomfortable realisation, then, is this:
What earthly use are we to our lost brother
When we must stay partly lost to find each other?
Only by this - this shrewd obliquity
Of speech, the broken word and the white lie,
Do we check ourselves, as we might halt the sun
One degree from the meridian
Then wedge it by the thickness of the book
That everything might keep the blackedged look
Of things, and that there might be time enough
To die in, dark to read by, distance to love.
Landing Light will entreat you to travel inward, to subterranean levels if need be, to "fish your body from the ground." In many ways, this is what all poetry should force — a tenuous walk along the murky morals of our own shorelines, a search for one's own twilight song, for landings in half-cluttered in-between places. And perhaps it takes a lad like Paterson to do this: to stand behind with just the right blend of seriousness and wit, convincing you that there are no walls, goading you to pick up your life and walk through, knowing that the crossing may well bring fresh scars.
TISHANI DOSHI
Landing Light, Don Paterson, Faber, p.84, £8.99.
Don Paterson's latest collection of poems, The Book of Shadows, is now available from Picador.
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