The sonnet is an architectural fixture as germane to Western thought as the flying buttress, and one nearly as old. Poems of 14 lines, metered and rhymed, came into vogue in 13th-century Tuscany and never quite left the scene. Indeed, sonnets and flowing robes are about the only things in common between poets otherwise as different (and distant) as Dante and Edna St. Vincent Millay. But in the hands of Don Paterson, the contemporary Scottish poet, the sonnet becomes a musical instrument that can carry the tune of a coquette or an old codger; elegize a marriage or a beloved dog; and satirize a cheerful telemarketer or the celluloid charm of Tony Blair.
40 Sonnets proves Paterson a contemporary master of the verse form. He has long been a student of the sonnet, having written a remarkably good commentary on Shakespeare’s sequence and edited 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney (1999). Here, Paterson aims to add his name to that genealogy. Winner of the Costa Poetry Award, 40 Sonnets is his first collection since Rain (2009), and it reminds us that sonnets take their name from the Italian “sonetto,” or little song, and that music has long been Paterson’s first, enduring love.
At the age of 16, the young guitarist left school and moved to London, where he joined a jazz-folk band that toured Europe and cut five albums. A chance encounter with the Leeds poet Tony Harrison put a different tune in Paterson’s ear: He studied poetry intensively and then began writing on his own. Since then, he has garnered most literary awards available to a British subject and serves as professor of poetry at the University of St Andrews.
Paterson has not let mantles become manacles. His 40 Sonnets are wide-ranging in subject and voice—from the casual terror of being stuck in an elevator to the guttural jabberwocky at a séance—but they tend toward ordinary life, his metaphysical conceits sandbagged with sardonic wit. In the first poem, “Here,” the speaker tries to rest in the afternoon, tending to a heart condition; but his mutinous body has other plans.
In heroic couplets, Paterson imitates the “two-ness” of the heart’s ventricles and the dualism between self and soul, management and labor, mind and biological machinery. Later, the speaker traces his embattled position back to his gestation:
An unborn child knows his lease is up when he hears his mother’s heartbeat knocking “like a landlord.” Yet the reader knocks harder upon the final surprising couplet, where “sealed” and “afield” conjure casket and burial ground, the son estranged from his mother by birth and death alike.
In other poems, Paterson hews closer to Petrarchan and Shakespearean patterns, offering contemporary remixes. But he also abandons the rulebook altogether, often to remarkable effect. Readers expect what Robert Frost termed a “lover’s quarrel with the world” in the agonistic dynamics of the sonnet, and he delivers that intensity in “The Foot,” an elegy for a child dying of injuries in a war zone, and in “Sentinel,” an ode for a daughter who sustains the speaker, even when he has failed in his parental duties:
Paterson’s speakers search out Homeric moorings in the murky ocean of human wishes. Similarly, in “A Calling,” a narrator recounts his first fall from grace, his book of genesis: He was caught trespassing in a women’s changing room “when I was six, and stood too long to look.” Later, as an adult, he sees his own reflection in a window’s “black glass,” and finds himself star[ing] right through the face that I deserve / as all my ghost-dogs thrash along the shore.
Reading his body’s legible wear, Paterson imagines the youthful “ghost-dogs” of his poems playing on the littoral and figurative shores for what we hope is a long time yet, as we stand in need of more such little songs.
Heather Treseler is a poet and essayist in Boston.
