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40 Sonnets by Don Paterson review – on the crest of a wave

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Nothing escapes the poet’s scrutiny in his first collection since the award-winning Rain

Reading a collection, poems sometimes seem to signal to one another. In Don Paterson’s 40 Sonnets, his first book since Rain, which won the 2009 Forward prize, there is a recurring sense of a shoreline. Wave makes this explicit and is a perfect subject for a sonnet, the form a seawall. I love the unlaboured wit, gathering momentum, human appropriation of water, the moment of breaking as a “full confession” and the effortlessly achieved (although I bet it wasn’t): “I was nothing but a fold in her blue gown” – a beautiful line. And I love the acceleration at the end, the sense of completion, with the sea crashing into town like a joyrider.

The opening sonnet, Here, is a conventional piece in heroic couplets, elegantly forming itself around an unconventional subject: a defective heart calling out to a first heart – a mother’s. Again, there is a sense of the littoral: “my dear sea up in arms at the wrong shore/ and her loud heart like a landlord at the door.” Nostalgia offers a further cresting of a wave: “I miss when I was the bloom on the sea.”

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