As one might expect from the self-explanatory and rather straightforward title 40 Sonnets, the fundamental concern of Don Paterson’s new collection of poetry is that particular form. It is a deceptive title however, very probably deliberately so, as those descriptors are not very applicable to the poems contained within the book.
The modern precedent for sonnet sequences has of course been set through prior extended ventures into the form by poets such as John Berryman in The Dream Songs, the Robert Lowell of the 1970s, The Dolphin for example, and both Tony Harrison and Marilyn Hacker’s persistent interest in the sonnet. Obviously Paterson’s collection also slides neatly in next to earlier accomplished sonneteers, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Rilke, should you have a dedicated sonnet section on your bookshelf (why wouldn’t you?).
To get to the bottom of Paterson’s version of the sonnet we need to apply a rather wide-ranging definition. These poems are at once staunchly formal but formally innovative, their shapes and subject matter myriad and complex. Paterson is interested in moving the sonnet on, exploring its limits, how much modern traffic it can admit, its contemporary relevance, but also keeping the canonical antecedents in the rear view mirror.
The majority of the poems in the book do consist of fourteen lines. The notable exception to this is a long, three-page prose poem at its centre entitled ‘The Version’ after the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra. Maybe this is a simplistic assertion, but the big hint here in flashing neon, given the poem’s positioning and near-total severance from the sonnet form other than its inclusion in a book named 40 Sonnets, is that something of the spirit of anti-poetry, the movement that seeks to dismantle traditional notions of poetic form and content, and of which Parra is central to, inhabits Paterson’s sonnets throughout the collection.
This feeling is highly noticeable in several of the poems that visually do not immediately look like how a sonnet would normally appear, or is supposed to look on the page … but this is the point.
The lines of ‘At the Perty’ consist of one word each and the poem is written in at least partly Scots dialect with some other Germanic and early northern European linguistic influences apparently in the mix. ‘Francesca Woodman’ draws on the life and work of the American photographer and is split into seven parts, one set of full rhymed couplets per-part. ‘Seven Questions about the Journey‘ incorporates hyphens and italics every other line in the manner of Dickinson but more orderly. ‘An Incarnation’ consists entirely of questions and the spacing and setting of the words on each line is highly irregular. ‘Shutter’ is a spare, imagistic, spindly sort of poem again with not many words to the line. ‘On Woodman’s Photography’ appropriately like ‘Francesca Woodman’, of which it is a continuation, is sub-divided into seven sections, this time each of their own category, as follows: ‘technique / To shoot your own ghost gentlemen – a primer: / locked room; open shutter; fucked self-timer’. I don’t recall Petrarch being so uncouth but perhaps my Italian needs more work. ‘Séance’ is both chilling and comedic depending on your interpretation. The poem begins as follows: ‘S p e k e. – s e e s s k s e e k / i e i k s e s s e – . – e s k k s e – s s k’. Questions follow. Is this the spirit voice struggling to make it through, hissing to the séance’s participants, an example of EVP? Is it a meditation on an area of Liverpool and the nuances of Scouse? Is its mimicing of Old English linguistic foil for the modern vocabulary, i.e. ‘to speak’? All of the above?
These poems jump off the page in striking fashion as sonnets that have been given the cocktail shaker treatment, tipped in and poured out a little bit discombobulated and certainly a lot more spiky.
In the poems that do look more traditionally sonnet-esque Paterson’s speakers are equally as question inducing, open ended and ready for polymorphic interpretation. Except here it is the subject matter and exploration of language that resist the form in lieu of more formal play. ‘Fit’ for example draws partly on an insistent sexual vocabulary that recalls Paterson’s earlier inclination towards suggestive titles and content such as ‘God’s Gift to Women’ (‘You come: I wish the wind would turn / so your face would stay like this, / your lips drawn up to blow a kiss.’) or ‘Imperial’ (‘Is it normal to get this wet? Baby, I’m frightened – ’). Elsewhere there are brilliant and beautiful phrases thrown around as if these things are distributed as free gifts, which conversely in a sense I guess they are (forgetting Faber’s cover price). Take the opening of ‘Threshold’: ‘Where have you gone, my little saving grace? Iona or Iola of the laugh / like falling silver … Now nothing’s in its place, / and all’s as light and cold as that blue scarf / I lost or left without, or I don’t own.’ This highly inventive, self-regulating and lyrically sumptuous register is present in all of the poems here.
Of these sonnets the main criticism is that Paterson’s poetic strategy at times begins to feel a little bit familiar and repetitive. Largely this is checked by the potent imagery and a startling deployment of the English language. Quite a few of the poems also have different and widely varying dedicatees.
‘At the Perty’ is discordantly dedicated to the Japanese poet Takuboku Ishikawa (this is a further installment in Paterson’s receptivity to Japanese influences, last explored in the poem ‘Renku: My Last Thirty Five Deaths’ from the poet’s previous volume Rain),
‘The Big Listener’ is dedicated to, or better, directed at Tony Blair: ‘They are your dead, who still rose to the birds / the day we filled the booths and made the cross, / before you’d forced them howling to their knees / to suffer your attentions. Spare us. Please.’. It is immediately and directly a political poem, charged with an accusatory voice where blame for the West’s military and political egotism and disgracing of itself globally through recent conflicts spills over from inculpating one dominant individual to a culture as a whole.
‘The Self-Illuminated’ is dedicated to Peter Porter and turns to a consideration of Scots festal liturgies: ‘only you could – at a time like this – / put me in mind of that rum business / with St Fillan of Glen Dochart, whose brief entry / in the Breviarium Aberdonense / tells of the stone he spat when he was born’.
‘Little Aster’ is a version of Gottfried Benn’s poem to compete with Michael Hoffman’s excellent and recent translations of the same poet, except Paterson roughens up the language giving ‘Some wag / had set a small blue flower between his teeth’ in place of Hoffman’s ‘Someone had jammed a lavender aster / between his teeth.’ The word ‘wag’ means the line exerts itself in a different way, inviting the reader to adjust their perspective and intuit the poem again.
These names and others also keep the reader on his or her toes and add a further level of intrigue to the work. Sonnets, as pretty much everybody knows, originally were directed at a particular addressee so it’s important to continue to think about this aspect, even as Paterson pushes for new lyric ground within the form.
Partly this new ground is discovered through clever sonic patterning and astute rhyming. Paterson integrates plenty of full rhyme and assonances into the poems but it doesn’t feel heavy or cloying. Here are the opening few lines from ‘Funeral Prayer’ by way of demonstration: ‘Today we friends and strangers meet / because our friend is now complete. / He has left time. Perhaps we feel / we are the ghosts and him the real – / so fixed and constant does he seem, / so starlike. For rhyme to be successful in a contemporary poem the possible dictum could be described as what’s rhymed should seem as to not rhyme. Obviously it does but what I’m getting at is how this requires a poet’s discreet handling of phrasing, cadence, beat, tempo, music, an ability to scatter and disperse the similar sounds in the lyric space the poem provides. Paterson has this ability in spades.
Paterson’s previous collection Rain was critically lauded, I have every suspicion that 40 Sonnets will attract the same level of praise and already is doing. This is a fantastic and vital collection.
Simon Haworth