Poetry on the Paragon: Don Paterson

This new collection from Don Paterson, his first since the Forward prize-winning Rain in 2009, is a series of forty sonnets. While some take a more traditional form, others are highly experimental, but what these poems share is a lyrical intelligence and musical gift.

In 40 Sonnets Paterson returns to some of his central themes – contradiction and strangeness, tension and transformation, the dream world, and the divided self – in some of the most powerful and formally assured poems he has written to date.  Wry, mordant, and often self-deprecating, there is a constant thread of touching pathos throughout the verse.