Brief and to the point

Very few people have ever dared to publish a book of aphorisms, and certainly hardly anyone in recent memory. The form is so demanding, basically requiring novelty, truth and literary excellence all at the same time, that even to embark on it needs a writer with high and justified confidence in his own abilities. Don Paterson is exactly that writer, the best poet of his generation, as well as an original and lucid thinker, and his boldness in bringing out The Book of Shadows is amply rewarded by the excellence of the final result.

One of the impressive things about his last collection of poetry, Landing Light, was its suggestive and impressionist strain of narrative. Here, too, the aphorisms often embark on what, in other hands, might be whole stories: ‘I came home. I had grown sick of my accent.’ Often these suggested stories are of sexual intensity: ‘A mercy, I suppose, that it ended. Any deeper intimacy with each other’s anatomy would have involved a murder.’ This last one, instantly comprehensible and yet a thought so bizarre that as far as I know it is entirely original, gives the exact flavour of Paterson.

Many of these aphorisms are really ‘characters’ in the genre of Theophrastus, defining individual people so perfectly that they become types: ‘Such is E.’s need to be loved, he experiences the casual indifference of a stranger and a snub from his closest friend as the same torment.’ Paterson is very strongly concerned with art, its practitioners, and the circumstances surrounding its production, and these characters do have an abstract edge to them, as individuals personify points in an argument: ‘He was a man of such wide-ranging ignorance … it had real subtlety, depth, reach.’

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

Paterson’s aphorisms can be wonderful observations of the way the world tends to impact on us; I had never quite seen what he describes when he says, ‘All those chairs and bathtubs and cars and shoes which, emptied of us, are immediately returned to absurdity.