40 Sonnets

This new collection from Don Paterson, his first since the Forward prize-winning Rain in 2009, is a series of forty sonnets. Some take a more traditional form, some are highly experimental, but what these poems share is a lyrical intelligence and musical gift that has been visible in his work since his first book of poems, Nil Nil, in 2009. Addressed to children, friends and enemies, the living and the dead, musicians, poets and dogs, these poems display an ambition in their scope and tonal range matched by the breadth of their concerns. Here, voices call home from the blackout and the airlock, the storm cave and the séance, the coalshed, the war, the ringroad, the forest and the sea. These are voices frustrated by distance, by shot glass and bar rail, by the dark, leaving the 'sound that fades up from the hiss, / like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing, / now full of its only note, its lonely call . . .' In 40 Poems 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. This is a rich and accomplished new work from one of the foremost poets writing in English today.

Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland. His first collection of poetry, Nil Nil (1993) won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. His following collection, God's Gift to Women (1997) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Don Paterson's poetry collection, Landing Light, won the 2001 Whitbread Poetry Award, and also received the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize - making him the first poet to have won the award twice. His latest poetry collection, 40 Sonnets, has been shortlisted for the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year award. He works as a musician and editor, teaches at the University of St Andrews, and lives in Kirriemuir, Scotland.