Don Paterson is frank, fearless and furious about everything

Memoirs by poets – the Top Ten? It’s an admittedly niche category, and since no one would ask this in normal conversation, or even in a pub quiz, here is the chart. It is based not on official sales or downloads but rather on my own tastes, prejudices and relatively recent reading: Last Night’s Fun, Ciaran Carson; It Goes With the Territory, Elaine Feinstein; A Fly in the Soup, Charles Simic; The U.S.A. School of Writing, Elizabeth Bishop; Efforts of Affection, Elizabeth Bishop; Tesserae, Denise Levertov; The Woman Who Thought Too Much, Joanne Limburg; The Photographer at Sixteen, George Szirtes; The Astonished Man, Blaise Cendrars; and straight to the top spot this week, Toy Fights, by Don Paterson, former poetry editor at Cape, a professor at the University of St Andrews, a musician, anthologist and, it turns out, much more besides.

It is a great memoir by a poet, partly because Paterson has little or nothing to say about poetry.