Don Paterson, “The Poetry (after Li Po)”

I found him wandering on the hill
one hot-blue afternoon.
He looked as skinny as a nail,
as pale-skinned as the moon;

below the broad shade of his hat
his face was cut with rain.
Dear God, poor Du Fu, I thought:
It’s the poetry again.

Has it really been five years since Don Paterson’s last collection of poems? I was introduced to his work at a New British Poetry reading in late 2004. Rain was first published in the UK last year, around the same time the title poem appeared in The New Yorker; a few months later, the book won the Forward Poetry Prize. Then, in January 2010, he received the Queen’s Gold Medal, which is an actual gold medal, struck by the Royal Mint and everything.

This collection also includes “The Swing” (first published in Granta), “The Lie” (Poetry) and “Miguel, his own take on a Vallejo poem, just as the poem above is a rendition of Li Po. (In an essay for Poetry, Paterson discusses the liberties he took with Vallejo’s original verse.) You’ll also want to take a look at “Two Trees,” which, as Andrew Shields says, “teases the reader by apparently offering an extended metaphor before taking it back.

(Oh, if you’d like to see another version of that Li Po verse, follow the link I just gave you and scroll down. As for Du Fu, I featured a poem of his last year.)

22 March 2010 | poetry |