The Fall at Home

The Fall at Home PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571338232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Get Book

Book Description
Aphorisms have been described as 'the obscure hinterland between poetry and prose' (New Yorker) - short pithy statements that capture the essence of the human condition in all its shades. In this New and Selected, master of the form Don Paterson brings the best examples from his three previous volumes together with ingenious new material relevant to today's world. Moving and mischievous, canny and profound - these wide-ranging observations of no more than one or two lines demonstrate that the aphorism is the perfect form for our times. Consciousness is the turn the universe makes to hasten its own end. * Agnosticism is indulged only by those who have never suffered belief. * Poet: someone in the aphorism business for the money.

The Fall at Home

The Fall at Home PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571338232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Get Book

Book Description
Aphorisms have been described as 'the obscure hinterland between poetry and prose' (New Yorker) - short pithy statements that capture the essence of the human condition in all its shades. In this New and Selected, master of the form Don Paterson brings the best examples from his three previous volumes together with ingenious new material relevant to today's world. Moving and mischievous, canny and profound - these wide-ranging observations of no more than one or two lines demonstrate that the aphorism is the perfect form for our times. Consciousness is the turn the universe makes to hasten its own end. * Agnosticism is indulged only by those who have never suffered belief. * Poet: someone in the aphorism business for the money.

The Poem

The Poem PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571341144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 572

Get Book

Book Description
Don Paterson is not only one of our great poets, but also an esteemed authority on the art of poetry. In illuminating and engaging prose, he offers his treatise on the making and the philosophy of 'the poem'.Paterson unpicks the process of verse composition with ambition, scholarly flair, and occasional scurrilities, exploring the mechanics of how a poem works and, essentially, what a poem is. His findings take the form of three essays that make up the three sections of the book: 'Lyric' attends to the sound of the poem; 'Sign' envisages ideas of poetic meaning; while 'Metre' studies its underlying rhythms. Through his various professional guises - as poetry editor at Picador Macmillan, professor of poetry at the University of St Andrews, and major prize-winning poet - no one is better placed to grant this 'insider's perspective'. For all those intrigued by the inner workings of the art form and its fundamental secrets, The Poem will surprise and delight.

Rain

Rain PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466880686
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 87

Get Book

Book Description
In this, his first volume of original verse since the award-winning Landing Light, Don Paterson is found writing at his most memorable and direct. In an assembly of masterful lyrics and monologues, he conjures a series of fables and charms that serve both to expose us to the unsettling forces within the world and to offer some protection against them. Whether outwardly elemental in their address or more personal in their direction, these poems—addressed to the rain and the sea, to his young sons or beloved friends—never shy from their inquiry into truth and lie, embracing everything in scope from the rangy narrative to the tiny renku. Rain, which includes the winner of this year's Forward Prize for the Best Individual Poem and an extended elegy for the poet Michael Donaghy, is Paterson's most intimate and manifest collection to date.

The Book of Shadows

The Book of Shadows PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9780330431842
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book

Book Description
Aphorism (n.): a pithy observation which contains a general truth 'All my teachers have been women. Though several men have taken me aside for an hour to tell me things they know' The Book of Shadows contains several hundred reflections and aphorisms on love, God, art, sex, death, work, and the spirit, imagination and conduct of the human animal. Writing with the same mixture of high seriousness, dark humour and lyric precision that define his poetry, Don Paterson has made a book to carry everywhere and open anywhere - to brighten or darken the moment, but always to administer a jolt to the idling mind. 'Falling and flying are near-identical sensations, in all but one final detail. We should remember this when we see those men and women seemingly in love with their own decline'

Zonal

Zonal PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571338267
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 89

Get Book

Book Description
Don Paterson's new collection of poetry starts from the premise that the crisis of mid-life may be a permanent state of mind. Zonal is an experiment in science-fictional and fantastic autobiography, with all of its poems taking their imaginative cue from the first season of The Twilight Zone (1959-1960), playing fast and loose with both their source material and their author's own life. Narrative and dramatic in approach, genre-hopping from horror to Black Mirror-style sci-fi, 'weird tale' to metaphysical fantasy, these poems change voices constantly in an attempt to get at the truth by alternate means. Occupying the shadowlands between confession and invention, Zonal takes us to places and spaces that feel endlessly surprising, uncanny and limitless.

The Sonnets to Orpheus

The Sonnets to Orpheus PDF Author: Rainer Maria Rilke
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0359819567
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book

Book Description
The fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus were written by Rilke in February 1922, in less than two weeks. Their central themes are Orpheus and his song of praise; what is sung is "Dasein", "being- here", the presence in the world. Rilke considered as a betrayal of his poetry any translation that would not reproduce, together with his thinking, his internal movement, his rhythm, his rhymes, his music. The goal of the translator has been to make that orchestration "heard" as much as possible, to try and reproduce the structure, rhyme and rhythm, of Rilke's Sonnets, in order for these translations to sound as echoes of the originals.

The Picador Book of Funeral Poems

The Picador Book of Funeral Poems PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1447204239
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Get Book

Book Description
In our deepest grief we still turn instinctively to poetry for solace. These poems, drawn from many different ages and cultures, remind us that the experience of parting is a timelessly human one: however alone the loss of a loved one leaves us, our mourning is also something that deeply unites us; these poems of parting and passing, of sorrow and healing, will find a deep echo within those who find themselves dealing with grief or bereavement. Whatever our loss, it is assuaged in finding a voice – and whether that voice is one of private remembrance or public memorial, The Picador Book of Funeral Poems will help you towards it.

The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse

The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse PDF Author: Kathleen Jamie
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 183885262X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 805

Get Book

Book Description
The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse is a timeless collection of Scottish poetry. It contains over three hundred poems ranging from the early medieval period to the twenty-first century, and paints a full-colour portrait of Scotland’s poetic heritage and culture. Edited and introduced by award-winning poets Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Peter Mackay, and including poems by Robert Burns, Carol Ann Duffy, Sorley Maclean, Violet Jacob, William Dunbar, Meg Bateman, George Mackay Brown, Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead, and many more, The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse is a joyous celebration of Scotland’s literary past, present and future.

Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets

Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571263992
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 530

Get Book

Book Description
Shakespeare's Sonnets are as important and vital today as they were when first published four hundred years ago. Perhaps no collection of verse before or since has so captured the imagination of readers and lovers; certainly no poem has come under such intense critical scrutiny, and presented the reader with such a bewildering number of alternative interpretations. In this illuminating and often irreverent guide, Don Paterson offers a fresh and direct approach to the Sonnets, asking what they can still mean to the twenty-first century reader.In a series of fascinating and highly entertaining commentaries placed alongside the poems themselves, Don Paterson discusses the meaning, technique, hidden structure and feverish narrative of the Sonnets, as well as the difficulties they present for the modern reader. Most importantly, however, he looks at what they tell us about William Shakespeare the lover - and what they might still tell us about ourselves.Full of energetic analysis, plain-English translations and challenging mini-essays on the craft of poetry - not to mention some wild speculation - this approachable handbook to the Sonnets offers an indispensable insight into our greatest Elizabethan writer by one of the leading poets of our own day.

Best Thought, Worst Thought

Best Thought, Worst Thought PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 9781555975050
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
"Contentious, rude, hilarious, moving, and truthful. A book you'll dip into for the rest of your life." —Ian Rankin The male genitals are worn externally as evolution is in the process of expelling them from the body. Another million years and they'll be stored in a drawer. With Best Thought, Worst Thought, the award-winning Scottish poet Don Paterson has assembled a comic, intelligent, and cranky collection of brief truths and conjectures and, in the process, revitalizes the classic pith of the aphorism. "The form's only virtue is its brevity," Paterson writes; "at least the reader cannot seriously hold that it has wasted their time."