![\"don-paterson.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/don-paterson.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nI found him wandering on the hill
\none hot-blue afternoon.
\nHe looked as skinny as a nail,
\nas pale-skinned as the moon;<\/p>\nbelow the broad shade of his hat
\nhis face was cut with rain.
\nDear God, poor Du Fu<\/i>, I thought:
\nIt’s the poetry again.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nHas it really been five years since Don Paterson’s last collection of poems<\/a>? I was introduced to his work at a New British Poetry<\/i><\/a> reading in late 2004. Rain<\/i><\/a> was first published in the UK last year, around the same time the title poem<\/a> appeared in The New Yorker<\/i>; a few months later, the book won the Forward Poetry Prize<\/a>. Then, in January 2010, he received the Queen’s Gold Medal<\/a>, which is an actual gold medal, struck by the Royal Mint and everything.<\/p>\n
This collection also includes “The Swing<\/a>” (first published in Granta<\/i>), “The Lie<\/a>” (Poetry<\/i>) and “Miguel<\/a>, his own take on a Vallejo poem, just as the poem above is a rendition of Li Po. (In an essay for Poetry<\/i>, Paterson discusses the liberties he took with Vallejo’s original verse<\/a>.) You’ll also want to take a look at “Two Trees<\/a>,” which, as Andrew Shields says, “teases the reader by apparently offering an extended metaphor before taking it back.<\/p>\n
(Oh, if you’d like to see another version of that Li Po verse<\/a>, follow the link I just gave you and scroll down. As for Du Fu, I featured a poem of his last year<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}