Landing Light
by Don Paterson
Summary
Paterson is a Dundee poet who was a working jazz guitarist before he was anything else, and the ear shows on every page. Landing Light is the collection where his technical command and the emotional stakes finally arrive together. It took both the 2003 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award.
The subjects are fatherhood, his own father, Scotland, faith and its absence, and the business of making things. Two of its finest poems are addressed to his young sons. Versions rather than literal translations run through the wider career, most famously from Machado and Rilke, in which Paterson takes a poem in another language and rewrites it as his own.
What makes it approachable is that Paterson is genuinely funny and completely unembarrassed about wanting a poem to work as a poem. He uses rhyme and metre without apology at a moment when much of British poetry had stopped bothering, and the formal shapes are the opposite of stuffy: they give the lines a spring you can hear.
Come for the individual pieces rather than a governing theme. This is a collection to read in twenty minute sittings, and one where a poem you skipped in January turns out in March to be the best thing in the book. If you have decided contemporary poetry is not for you, Paterson is the strongest argument to the contrary currently available in English. He wants to be read, which sounds like a low bar and is not one that every prize winning poet clears.
Historical Context & Significance
Landing Light was published by Faber and Faber in 2003 and took both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award, a double that put Paterson at the front of his generation.
The T.S. Eliot win carried a specific distinction. Paterson had already taken the prize in 1997 for God's Gift to Women, and Landing Light made him the first poet to win it twice, a record that stood alone for years and is the reason he turns up in almost every discussion of the prize's history.
He has spent much of his career shaping other people's work as well as his own, serving as poetry editor at Picador for more than twenty five years and as Professor at the University of St Andrews. His versions of Rilke, published as Orpheus in 2006, extended the translation method this collection had introduced.