Paterson makes it ‘Rain’ with new poetry collection

Don Paterson made his living playing jazz before he became a poet. Though this makes it tempting to look for the influence of music in his new collection “Rain,” he counsels against such facile links.

“I’m not convinced that music and poetry are any closer than, say, cinema and poetry as sister arts,” Paterson said in an interview. “People have said they hear ‘jazz rhythms’ in my stuff, but it’s wishful thinking.” Nonetheless, he suspects that “if you train as a musician it probably tunes your ear.”

Paterson’s comfort in exploring different registers results in an impressively broad group of poems for a 60 page book. “Rain” includes two poems in Scots dialect as well as a tribute to the Georgian electronic musician Natalie Beridze, alongside formal exercises like a collection of 36 taut renku.

Though Paterson has received honors like the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize, he is hesitant to evaluate his own work. When asked about the place of “Rain” relative to his earlier collections, he said “You’re always the worst-placed person to answer. You’d like to think it’s some kind of radical development, and maybe it isn’t. One of the reasons you write these things is to relieve yourself of the responsibility of an opinion about them.”

“Rain” includes loose translations of poems by Cesar Vallejo, Antonio Machado, Li Po, and others. Paterson, whose earlier books include an English version of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus,” said that he hopes such efforts let him “borrow a voice that might allow me to deal with certain subjects a little more directly or bravely.”

His engagement with these other poets’ works is also a way to avoid stylistic typecasting. “You don’t want yourself to get attached to what you think of as ‘your own voice,’ because it leads to a kind of unconscious self-censorship,” he said. He is also motivated to do these translations out of dissatisfaction with existing renderings.

One of the most affecting pieces in the collection is a nine-page elegy for the poet Michael Donaghy, titled “Phantom.” “Michael was from the Bronx. He’s still not so well known in the States, but he was a major poet over here [in the U.K.], and a very dear friend,” Paterson said. “Phantom” explores their shared obsessions with literature and art through a process the poet dubs “materialist prayer.” The result is a meditation characterized by spare, haunting lines like “Your eye is no eye but an exit wound.” It concludes with the startling and beautiful: “I closed my mouth and put out its dark light./ I put down Michael’s skull and held my own.”

Using poetry to cope with the death of a friend exemplifies Paterson’s philosophy of poetry. He says that people turn to poetry “at certain times in their lives, for comfort or assuagement, or to see their irrational joy or pain take the form of an expressive logic, so they can make a little sense of it, or to have a dammed-up feeling blasted open and released.”

Some modernist poetry, he fears, alienates these general readers by focusing too much on “the poetry constituency.” With his own work, he aims to do something different. “If you can do this little trick with words, then you’re obliged to try and make something useful to people.”