God's Gift to Women
by Don Paterson
Summary
God's Gift to Women confirmed Don Paterson as the most formidable British poet of his generation, a Dundee jazz guitarist who had come to poetry sideways and arrived with a technique most lifelong academics never acquire. The title is a joke with a blade in it, and that is the collection's method throughout: poems of bars, trains, love affairs, and Scottish darkness, machined to a high formal finish and wired with wit, so that the reader is laughing a half second before the floor gives way. Paterson's great subjects are already in place, sex and its aftermaths, the dead and the never born, God treated as a live and troubling hypothesis rather than an ornament, and Scotland itself, particularly in the poems that circle Dundee and the vanished industrial Tay. What separates him from the crowd of the clever is pressure: the forms are not display but containment, rhyme and meter holding material that would otherwise be unsayable, and the best poems here have the compression of aphorism with the reach of story. He was writing as a working musician, and the book hears like one, its cadences tuned for the ear first. God's Gift to Women won the 1997 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Paterson would become the first poet to win the Eliot twice when Landing Light took it in 2003. As poetry editor at Picador for a quarter century he then shaped the British lists themselves, an influence nearly as large as the poems.
Historical Context & Significance
Paterson arrived with the New Generation poets promotion of 1994, the cohort marketed as poetry's answer to Britpop, and God's Gift to Women, published in 1997, was the book that made the hype look understated; the 1997 T.S. Eliot Prize sealed it. His double Eliot, completed by Landing Light in 2003, made him the first to win the prize twice, and the aphorisms, the versions of Rilke and Machado, and the jazz guitar he never gave up rounded out a career the establishment eventually garlanded with the OBE and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. As Picador's poetry editor he then chose a quarter century of other poets' books, an influence nearly as large as his own; for readers, this early collection remains the sharpest introduction to a poet who made difficulty swing.