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.