Landing Light: Poems

by Don Paterson

Overview

Now in paperback, the highly acclaimed collection by Scottish poet Don Paterson, winner of the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize

Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver . . .
—from "Waking with Russell"

Hailed for its "seriousness and moral urgency" (The Independent), Landing Light is one of the most important and resonant poetry collections to come out of Britain in recent years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555974473
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	06/27/2006
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.16(w) x 8.21(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

Don Paterson is a poet, editor, and musician. He is the author of The White Lie: New and Selected Poetry and co-editor (with Charles Simic) of New British Poetry. He lives in Kirriemuir, Scotland.

Read an Excerpt

Landing Light

---

By Don Paterson

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 2005 Don Paterson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-55597-417-1

---

Chapter One

Luing When the day comes, as the day surely must, when it is asked of you, and you refuse to take that lover's wound again, that cup of emptiness that is our one completion,

I'd say go here, maybe, to our unsung innermost isle: Kilda's antithesis, yet still with its own tiny stubborn anthem its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye. Leaving the motherland by a two-car raft, the littlest of the fleet, you cross the minch to find yourself, if anything, now deeper in her arms than ever - sharing her breath,

watching the red vans sliding silently between her hills. In such intimate exile, who'd believe the burn behind the house the straitened ocean written on the map? Here, beside the fordable Atlantic, reborn into a secret candidacy, the fontanelles reopen one by one in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow,

aching at the shearwater's wail, the rowan that falls beyond all seasons. One morning you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain the first touch of the light will finish you. Waking with Russell Whatever the difference is, it all began the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again, possessed him, till it would not fall or waver; and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin but his own smile, or one I'd rediscovered. Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin and the true path was as lost to me as ever when you cut in front and lit it as you ran. See how the true gift never leaves the giver: returned and redelivered, it rolled on until the smile poured through us like a river. How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men! I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever. The White Lie I have never opened a book in my life, made love to a woman, picked up a knife, taken a drink, caught the first train or walked beyond the last house in the lane. Nor could I put a name to my own face. Everything we know to be the case draws its signal colour off the sight till what falls into that intellectual night

we tunnel into this view or another falls as we have fallen. Blessed Mother, when I stand between the sunlit and the sun make me glass: and one night I looked down

to find the girl look up at me and through me with such a radiant wonder, you could not read it as a compliment and so seek to return it. In the event I let us both down, failing to display more than a halfhearted opacity. She turned her face from me, and the light stalled between us like a sheet, a door, a wall. But consider this: that when we leave the room, the chair, the bookend or the picture-frame we had frozen by desire or spent desire is reconsumed it its estranging fire

such that, if we slipped back by a road too long asleep to feel our human tread we would not recognise one thing by name, but think ourselves in Akhenaten's tomb;

then, as things ourselves, we would have learnt we are the source, not the conducting element. Imagine your shadow burning off the page as the dear world and dead world disengage -

in our detachment, we would surely offer such offence to that Love that will suffer no wholly isolated soul within its sphere, it would blast straight through our skin just

as the day would flush out the rogue spark it found still holding to its private dark. But like our ever present, all-wise god incapable of movement or of thought,

no one at one with all the universe can touch one thing; in such supreme divorce, what earthly use are we to our lost brother when we must stay partly lost to find each other? Only by this - this shrewd obliquity of speech, the broken word and the white lie, do we check ourselves, as we might halt the sun one degree from the meridian

then wedge it by the thickness of the book that everything might keep the blackedged look of things, and that there might be time enough to die in, dark to read by, distance to love. (Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Landing Light by Don Paterson Copyright © 2005 by Don Paterson . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Editorial Reviews

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 billiardplayer’s feel for the way language can spin us subtly this way and that.” —Billy Collins

“It's a long time since I've been knocked sideways by a book of poems, but the life, energy, verbal precision, and inventiveness of Don Paterson's Landing Light kept me awake at night.” —A. S. Byatt, The Guardian

From the Publisher