The White Lie: New and Selected Poetry

by Don Paterson

Overview

A rising star in the United Kingdom, contemporary Scottish poet Paterson is poised to become a major voice of our time. The London Review of Books calls him "one of the most talented Scottish writers of the new generation." The White Lie is the first and only American selection of Paterson's lyric and urbane poems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555973537
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	08/01/2001
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.84(w) x 9.38(h) x 0.33(d)

About the Author

Don Paterson has written several collections of poems, including Nil Nil, God’s Gift to Women, The Eyes, Rain, and Landing Light, which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland.

Table of Contents

	From Nil Nil
	The Ferryman's Arms	3
	Morning Prayer	4
	Filter	5
	Exeunt	6
	Sunset, Visingso	9
	Ezekiel	10
	Sisters	12
	Seed	13
	An Elliptical Stylus	14
	Amnesia	16
	The Alexandrian Library	18
	Next to Nothing	28
	The Trans-Siberian Express	29
	Pioneer	30
	Wind-Tunnel	31
	Poem	32
	Perigee	33
	Bedfellows	34
	Nil Nil	35
	From God's Gift to Women
	Prologue	41
	00:00: Law Tunnel	43
	The Scale of Intensity	45
	The Chartres of Gowrie	47
	11:00: Baldovan	48
	A Private Bottling	50
	To Cut It Short	54
	Buggery	55
	God's Gift to Women	56
	The Lover	65
	Imperial	66
	Little Corona	67
	12:00: Dronley	68
	The Alexandrian Library Part II: The Return of the Book	69
	19:00: Auchterhouse	78
	from Advice to Young Husbands	79
	Candlebird	80
	From The Eyes
	Advice	83
	To Emiliano Barral	84
	The Eyes	85
	Profession of Faith	86
	Meditation	87
	Paradoxes	88
	Poetry	89
	Promethean	90
	Road	91
	Siesta	92
	3 O'Clock	93
	The Waterwheel	94
	The Work	95
	To the Great Zero	96
	New Poems
	The Wreck	99
	Luing	100
	St. Brides: Sea-Mail	101
	My Love	103
	The White Lie	105

Editorial Reviews

If you are wondering whether great poems are still being written, you ought to read Don Paterson's The White Lie.” —Charles Simic

“America is in for a delightful treat now that the work of Scottish poet Don Paterson is within its easy reach. A perfect blend of light and dark humor, his poems combine the mordant with the celebratory, the sweetness of the heart with the bitter taste of experience. Most of all, he knows how to write poems in which every line is awake, every one composed with care and a billiard-player's feel for the way language can spin us subtly this way and that.” —Billy Collins

“His is the kind of poetry that teaches all us writers of prose a thing or three; words weighed with equal attention to form and function; sentiment reigned in and challenged; images of such particularity and elegance, it makes you jealous to look at them. Above all, Paterson has an infinite sensitivity to the world, and that rare quality makes any collection of his work a cause for celebration.” —Zadie Smith

“The sheer vigor and liveliness of Mr. Paterson's imagination, the bustle and thunder of his language, his speed of thought, admirable energy, wit, and dexterity make The White Lie an occasion in the history of modern poetry worth boisterous celebration.” —Anthony Hecht

From the Publisher

Paterson's latest book collects poems from his first three volumes—Nil, Nil; God's Gift to Women; and The Eyes—along with five new poems. This is well-made verse, and Paterson exhibits a fine ear. But while the romantic notion of the autodidact who thumbs his nose at the old college dons is attractive, Paterson tends to overcompensate with heavy-handed erudition smothered in gritty, sentimental images of street love gone sour. The lines are sprinkled with predictable Gaelic references, good-old Anglo-Saxon vulgarity, obscure and archaic words and British Isles street slang. The poems frequently resort to violent adolescent fantasies and troubling visions of cruelty to women and children; Paterson is a younger, Scottish version of Bukowski. It's a bit of fun for the lads, and perhaps there's even an element of self-parody, but the tiresome, unrelenting nihilism feels more like impetuousness than outrage. As Paterson writes in a poem aptly titled " Advice": "To be quite honest with you,/none of this is terribly important."
—Stephen Whited