The Arctic by Don Paterson review – poetry from the last-chance saloon

Paterson tackles everything from nuclear apocalypse to the male appendage in this confident, blackly humorous collection

The Arctic defies categorisation. It is a staggeringly miscellaneous collection, as deep, inexhaustible and boundless as Mary Poppins’s carpetbag – although minus the magically reassuring properties – a troubling book out of which varied marvels come. Some of Don Paterson’s subjects, in this 10th collection, are vast and ungraspable – the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, the possibility of nuclear extinction. In Easter 2020, he recalls the alienating cruelty of the pandemic as a ballad, the form an innocent foil to a canny fury against government (or lack of it) – it is an ICU, not a nursery rhyme.

Several poems touch on vanity, including Echoism, after Ovid (there are further excursions with Greek gods elsewhere), and the idea of conceit extends itself seamlessly to the ongoing scrutiny of politicians with swingeing snapshots of an unnamed Boris Johnson in Spring Letter “desperate” to go to Ukraine and a line (from Salvage) in which Paterson longs for a new planet: “for any old landmass I don’t have to share with Jacob Rees-Mogg”. His writing is defined by its rigorous pessimism, comic vitriol and unswerving formal skill.

The Arctic by Don Paterson is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

The paragraph about Don Paterson’s father was amended on 30 August because Russell L Paterson was teetotal and, although the dedicatee of On Sounding Good, not its subject.