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""Rain" is a truly important book, not only in the development of this must-read poet, but because it engages with the rough and tumble of life in a way we recognise as true. Read it now, before it becomes famous." --Fiona Sampson, "The Independent"
"The master of shadowplay demonstrates again that he remains clear-eyed about the representations he so artfully contrives." --Adam Newey, "The Guardian"
"Don Paterson's poetry collection"""Rain" contains some great-and I do mean great-poems. He comes very close to Yeats at moments; Yeats without the hocus-pocus. First time through, I reread 'The Day' three times, just to confirm it was as astounding as I suspected." --Toby Litt, "The New Statesman" (Best Books of the Year)
"Paterson is simply one of the best living poets in the UK." --"The Observer" (England)
"The musical drive of the poems gives them an immense advantage in power; elements become lodged in the ear and hence in the memory.
Dealing as this book does, in its diverse meditations, with loss, guilt, anger, helplessness, and many of the other insalubrious emotions that are the lot of human beings, it seems only just that the final poem (and the title poem at that) should be a gesture aimed at washing away the aches of the past, much as Jehovah was said to have washed the sinful world clean with the flood. Rain, in this poem, is the atmospheric rain of a noir film. Such a film, Paterson says, can do no wrong, regardless of its possible errors of plot or scene or casting. Forget the spillages of our past: the ink, the milk, the blood. We are cleansed, but we are also 'the fallen rain's own sons and daughters / and none of this, none of this matters.' It is a sort of secular absolution, making the corrosive world briefly bearable, perhaps.
This is a poignant and remarkable book, worth a reader's thoughtful attention. A number of the poems included in it are, I feel sure, destined to last." --Jan Schreiber, "Contemporary Poetry Review" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Paterson is a very good technician. He uses a fairly wide range of form to deliver his subject. He is equally adept with managing rhyming couplets and presenting interesting schemes of imperfect rhymes. In the main he avoids blank verses in stead working at presenting the sonnet almost in a new guise as in the "Landscape" and "Miguel". His mastery of form and subject can be seen in the poem "Renku: My last Thirty-Five Deaths". Here Paterson appears to contrast the every day here and now reality with something more profound and beyond our grasp. And he explores this contrast between reality and the unknown by alternating rhyming couplets with triplet verses.
He certainly displays great control over the form in which he writes. Take my favourite poem from the collection - namely "The Day". In this poem, the stanzas take the forms of sextants in which Paterson manages to maintain a scheme where the second and penultimate lines rhyme. But more interestingly as a third person narrates the experience of old age and the reflections of two lovers, Paterson manages to shift the tone between the narrator and the two people who enter upon a dialogue brilliantly. This gives profound effect to a message about love, life and the question what is life all about.
There are some lively and highly imaginative metaphor and simile. Paterson begins a poem entitled "Parallax" thus: "The moon lay silent on the sea/as on a polished shelf". In the context of the poem, the language of these two lines is quite simply a pleasure to read.
This is a very good collection of poems ranging from the playful, the obscure to the profound. I found them thought provoking. Just when I thought I had grasped the meaning of a given poem, I found that very meaning illusive and evasive. This is the stuff of which good poetry is made - do read the collection.
Paterson has a masterful handling of form which never feels intrusive and always enhances the content of the poems, from the light-hearted opener in rhymed couplets ('Two Trees') to the darkly insistent 'The Lie' - five quatrains rhyming AABA and a concluding couplet BA. (You try it!) And then there's the techno geek-speak love poem 'Song for Natalie "Tusja" Beridze' with its ridiculously long lines, held together by equally ridiculous rhymes (eg. 'Nobuzaku Takemura' with 'harmonic bravura', and 'buggy or virusy' with 'software piracy'). It's a joy to read just to see what he's going to come up with next.
But there is also great emotional weight - the end of a love affair; poems about his son; and most impressively, the fittingly brilliant sequence 'Phantom' in memory of his friend, the late poet Michael Donaghy.
An exceptional collection... and probably the best released so far this century.
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