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Liminal, October 25, 2011
One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.
These are the final words of, "Luing," the first brief poem in this shining collection by award-winning Scottish poet Don Patterson. I first encountered it a few weeks ago in an article in the New York Times travel section, about visiting the inshore Hebridean island of the same name. Though it is a lucid, beautifully descriptive poem, Paterson is far from being a landscape-painter in verse. Rather, what he appears to be interested in are liminal states, the points of transition between dark and light, real and irreal, life and what comes before and after. The threshold.
Though writing mostly in simple language, Paterson is a complex poet. But let me quote in full one of the most approachable poems in the collection, the first of two sonnets about the poet's young sons, "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 among men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.
Paterson's reference to Dante is significant. Now in his later forties, he clearly feels himself "in the middle of his way" in more senses than one. The poem after this one is about a son who almost died at birth; shortly after is a poem about a dead body washed ashore in a momentary rebirth: "He hung there for a second / and somewhere in that second was perfected / then came apart and fell into the surf." Contrasts between extreme states abound: "the disintricated life -- crucified and free, the still man moving."
Paterson is a writer of range. Some of these poems are short, others span several pages. A few are written in Lallans Scots (the language of Robert Burns) with copious glossing footnotes, others strike a relatively high diction. He has a free translation of Canto XIII of Dante's INFERNO (the forest of the suicides), combining richness of imagery with modernity of diction; he has other poems after Cavafy or Rilke. His "Letter to the Twins" (Romulus and Remus), shifts from classical rhetoric to erotic heat. A gothic dream search for his nemesis comes up with his own distorted reflection. A box dug up from a beach reveals a squashed-up angel, "like the turkey leftovers at Christmas, but covered / with feathers and treacle and mould."
Contrasts, though, are very much his essence, this poet poised on the stair-landing between floors, between the light above and the dark below, the poet of thresholds:
No singer of the day or night
is lucky as I am
the dark my sounding-board, the light
my auditorium.
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