Paterson’s ‘Rain’ Pours Poems

On the brink of the 19th century, in the Scottish town of Dumfries, the poet Robert Burns wrote: “the honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor / Is king o’ men for a’ that.” Two centuries later, and about 100 miles away in St Andrews, poet and musician Don Paterson is striving for the same down-to-earth honesty in his fifth volume of poetry, “Rain.” In this new collection, Paterson amasses popular images of sentimentality and reimagines them amid the hectic cacophony of contemporary life.

Paterson was born in Dundee, at the eastern edge of Scotland. In the spirit of a troubadour, he began writing poetry while he worked as a jazz musician in London. Since his first book of poetry, “Nil Nil,” Paterson has achieved serious recognition, receiving honors such the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Most recently, he has received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

His aspirations as a jazz musician, which preceded his interest in poetry, continue to have a strong influence on his verse. For Paterson, poetry is first and foremost a transcription of music—“sing me that old silent song,” he writes. His ear for music is evident in the formal construction of his poems, in which he often employs straightforward rhyme schemes. His poem “The Swing,” for instance, strictly follows the ballad form. He writes, “the bright sweep of its radar-arc / is all the human dream / handing us from dark to dark / like a rope over a stream.” One can easily hear the oscillating, swing-like rhythm, and this type of melodic accessibility permeates the entire book.

Paterson draws on a wide range of poetic conventions, alluding to poets of a remarkable range of nationalities, from Chinese classical poets Li Po and Du Fu, to the French surrealist Robert Desnos and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. Though he always chooses to write in clear cut poetic forms, he draws these forms from traditions across the globe. It is impressive to find a poet who writes in a Scottish dialect in one poem—“I’m staunin here upricht, wi’ you”—and in the Japanese poetic form of Renku in another.

Just as he uses easily-recognizable forms, Paterson also takes on a familiar, didactic voice. The poem “Correctives” depicts the narrator’s son who uses his right hand to support his left in an effort to write more neatly. As he describes this boy, Paterson derives a broader conclusion about humanity from the image: “the whole man must be his own brother / for no man is himself alone.” It would be easy to imagine this brief poem as a sort of family maxim delivered from generation to generation.

Although Paterson tends to use older and more traditional verse forms, his book also shows a firm grip on present-day life, displayed in his nonchalant attitude and a variety of witticisms. In the montage-like sequence “Renku: My Last Thirty-five Deaths,” Paterson at times sounds almost too playful to be taken seriously. “If I had a happier dream / this might have been a better poem,” he writes. However, it is precisely this addition of levity that offsets the often overly-sentimental voice that takes precedence in some of his other poems. Another large portion of “Rain” is composed of mysterious narratives. Paterson’s mystery, however, does not demand a literary interpretation or decoding, but simply asks to be absorbed, as a child might listen to a fairy tale. The opening poem of the volume, “Two Trees,” tells a story of Don Miguel who grafts an orange tree to a lemon tree. The hybrid orange-lemon tree mysteriously brings forth “two lights in the dark leaves” before it is axed in half by the subsequent owner of the garden. Paterson implies at the end of the poem, that there is no hidden message in this tale: “They were trees, and trees don’t weep or ache or shout. / And trees are all this poem is about.”

The simplicity of “Two Trees” is characteristic of the collection as a whole. Paterson’s straightforward rhythms, earnest tones, and candid narratives are equally approachable to poetry novices and veterans alike. Paterson shows a consistently genuine and honest appreciation of ordinary human life. In the title poem, Paterson writes, “I love all films that start with rain... / However bad or overlong / such a film can do no wrong.” Like the images of rain that Paterson admires, his own brand of poetic sincerity, “however bad or overlong” still manages to revitalize forms and subjects that might otherwise seem too traditional or overused.