''Rain'' is a collection of poetry by the Scottish poet
Don Paterson
Donald Paterson (born 1963) is a Scottish poet, writer and musician.
Background
Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1990 and his poem "A Private Bottling" won the Arvon Foundation International ...
. It was published in 2009 by
Faber and Faber and won the Forward poetry prize for best poetry collection of the same year.
Don Paterson wins the Forward poetry prize with 'masterful' collection , Books , guardian.co.uk
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Contents
Rain opens with a quote from Antonio Porchia and Paterson regularly works off the work of other writers (often non-English language writers) such as Slavoj Žižek, Li Po
Li Bai (, 701–762), also pronounced as Li Bo, courtesy name Taibai (), was a Chinese poet, acclaimed from his own time to the present as a brilliant and romantic figure who took traditional poetic forms to new heights. He and his friend Du Fu ...
, and César Vallejo
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza (March 16, 1892 – April 15, 1938) was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only two books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators ...
. Rain contains 30 poems. Aside from the title poem some of the more famous poems included are:
* Two Trees
* The Swing
* Renku: My Last Thirty-Five Deaths
* The Bathysphere
* Phantom
The collection features poems dedicated to both of Paterson's children, the founder of origami Akira Yoshizawa
Akira Yoshizawa (吉澤 章 ''Yoshizawa Akira''; 14 March 1911 – 14 March 2005) was a Japanese origamist, considered to be the grandmaster of origami. He is credited with raising origami from a craft to a living art. According to his own es ...
, and the poet Michael Longley
Michael Longley, (born 27 July 1939, Belfast, Northern Ireland), is an Anglo-Irish poet.
Life and career
One of twin boys, Michael Longley was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to English parents, Longley was educated at the Royal Belfast A ...
; the book is also dedicated, as a whole, to Michael Donaghy
Michael Donaghy (May 24, 1954 – September 16, 2004) was a New York City poet and musician, who lived in London from 1985.
Life and career
Donaghy was born into an Irish family and grew up with his sister Patricia in the Bronx, New York, lo ...
. As in his earlier collections, Paterson uses Scottish Dialect in many of the shorter lyrics in this work - words such as 'tae', 'och', 'wi' and 'gairdie'. He sometimes glosses such dialects, as in 'The Human Shield', but does not always, as in 'Verse'. In comparison to his eelier collections, Paterson's use of traditional forms seems limited: Rain features only one Sonnet, 'Miguel', a form that would dominate his next collection 40 Sonnets (2015), as well as a Renku
, or , is a Japanese form of popular collaborative linked verse poetry. It is a development of the older Japanese poetic tradition of ''ushin'' renga, or orthodox collaborative linked verse. At renku gatherings participating poets take turns provi ...
, and many poems of quatrain stanzas. However he predominantly writes in free verse, and blank verse.
Bibliography
*
Notes
British poetry collections
2009 poetry books
Faber and Faber books
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