the blind eye, landing light, the book of shadows etc.

Right now am sinking into Don Paterson's new book of thoughts, poems and scribblings "The Blind Eye" - a book of late advice. It is brilliant. Here are ten favourite aphorisms from his last collection book of shadows:

Falling and flying are near-identical sensations, in all but one final detail. We should remember this when we see those men and women seemingly in love with their own decline.

Traditionally, the defining moment in a man's life arrives when he looks in his shaving glass and finds his father staring back; but there is a day so much more terrible we rarely speak of it - when he catches himself naked in a full-length mirror and sees his mother...

Suddenly there was nothing I could do to impress her. All the brilliant discussion, the sublime compliments, the poems and songs I laid at her feet... I began to fear the worst: that if I was loved at all I was loved for myself.

All those chairs and bathtubs and cars and shoes which, emptied of us, are immediately returned to absurdity. How many lonely things we make for the world.

Almost everything in the room will survive you. To the room, you are already a ghost, a pathetic soft thing, coming and going.

No fury more righteous than that of a sinner accused of the wrong sin.

Though we acquire an air of inviolate religiosity in our solitude, nothing makes us less human than a solitude interrupted; specifically, the monophone treble obscenity of the William Tell Overture on the mobile phone of the guy opposite me on the train, his huge red spectacles, his yelled bonhomie... I find myself praying that his next call will bring him news of the death of his mother.

If you were offered one hour or two, would you really choose two? Now: work backwards.

We’re forever reading atrocities as mere omens; anything to do nothing a little while longer.

I am berated by a young gunslinger of a drama critic for my 'naive and passé symbolism'. In my next play, a young gunslinger of a drama critic is yanked from the audience, hung and disembowelled in the first scene. I take a deep satisfaction in the thought that even he - however naive and passé he may feel it to be - will find in this no trace of the symbolic whatsoever.

All my teachers have been women. Although several men have taken me aside for an hour to tell me things they know.

No email for an hour. The bastards.

I came home. I had grown sick of my accent.

The sadness of old shoes. Putting them on again, I suddenly remember all the old friends I haven’t seen for ages; and then why.

The aphorism is a brief waste of time. The poem a complete waste of time. the novel a monuemental waste of time.



Check out blind eye, landing light, orpheus, the book of shadows or anything else he's done...it's pretty much all consistently class. Incidentally he also edited an anthology with my old poetry/creative writing teacher Jo Shapcott called Last Words. It's great too... as is Jo's first proper collection "Electroplating the Baby" Dive at them and paint your mind.