When Don Paterson’s Landing Light came out in 2004 it cemented his position in the forefront of British poetry. His work could no longer be labelled as simply laddish and playful, a view that had been understandable though not accurate, following his first two collections, Nil Nil and God’s Gift to Women. This new level of seriousness and maturity found in Landing Light were achieved with no let up in the technical brilliance that he had previously demonstrated. Rain, his latest collection, first released in 2009, marks another development in Paterson’s style. The writing has become more direct and seemingly more personal; some of the strangeness reminiscent of Borges has been lost, but it has been replaced by a quiet thoughtfulness that is equally powerful.

That said, Paterson still knows how to play with the reader. The final lines of the first and last poems both deny their own importance: “And trees are all this poem is about.” (‘Two Trees) “And none of this, none of this matters.” (‘Rain’). Yet Paterson knows as well as anyone that meaning in poetry is generated not by the writer alone, and that the reader always gets a say in the matter. With these poems it is impossible not to look beyond their surface meaning, even where expressly forbidden. The poem ‘Two Trees’ which opens the collection concerns Don Miguel grafting his orange to his lemon tree, only for the next occupant of the house to separate them. Given the attention paid to words by any poet, it would beggar belief that Paterson failed to notice or intend the grafting of his and Michael Donaghy’s first names in the full name of the poem’s protagonist. The book as a whole is dedicated to the poet Michael Donaghy who died in 2004, and it includes a number of poems that deal with his death both directly and allusively. A further suggestions for reading ‘Two Trees’ on additional levels is thrown up by the fact that Don Paterson includes in Rain, as he did in Landing Light, a poem for each of his twin boys; again Paterson cannot have failed to notice the ‘family tree’ implications of the poem. His attempts to pin these poems down are clearly tongue-in-cheek.

We return repeatedly in Rain to a theory of the world that can be seen to sanction this freedom that each reader has to read a poem in his or her own way. In ‘The Day’, a wonderful science fiction poem, Paterson has a character state that: “We only dream this place up in one head.” In other words, how we perceive the world could well be unique to ourselves, or at the very least it is impossible to know for certain whether the way you perceive it is similar or different from another’s perspective. Linked to this is the fact that the world we observe with our senses is very far from being a complete picture: man’s world is just “the glare / of the world’s utility / returned by his eye-beam.” (‘The Error’)

As mentioned above, the collection contains a number of elegies to Don Paterson’s close friend and fellow poet Michael Donaghy, the longest of which is ‘Phantom’. It is this poem that comes closest to the style of Paterson’s earlier work, resembling at times the artfully convoluted style present in the ‘Alexandrian Library’ sequence which spanned his first three books. Near the opening of ‘Phantom’ a desk lamp is turned “off, then lower still.” This neat description of ultimate negation reflects a theme present in much of the book. The word ‘nothing’, for example, appears in 6 of the 29 poems, while one of the poems contains no words at all. However, despite this focus on negativity and lack, the sheer beauty of the writing ensures the collection is a positive experience. At times a line or image can seem so true, so unforgettable, that it seems almost unbelievable that it has not been written before, as when he describes the effect of a storm: “the tree, a woman mad with grief, / the bush, a panicked silver shoal.” There are even moments of humour in the book, most notably the large central piece ‘Love Poem for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze’, which celebrates the technical language of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) and builds bravura rhymes on its sprawling line-length.

Rain has been praised in multiple publications, and was awarded the prestigious Forward Prize for the best collection of 2009, but there is no harm in adding another voice of assent. This is a memorable and startling collection, and certainly one of the finest books of British poetry published in recent memory.

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