40 Sonnets
May 2017 · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
eBook
64
Pages
family_home
Eligible
info
reportRatings and reviews aren’t verified Learn more
About this eBook
This collection, which won the 2015 Costa Poetry Award, is an exhibition of the Dundee-born poet’s stunningly accomplished adoption of the sonnet’s ancient structure
This collection from Don Paterson, his first since the Forward Prize–winning Rain in 2009, is a series of forty luminous sonnets. Some take a traditional form, while others experiment with the reader’s conception of the sonnet, but they all share the lyrical intelligence and musical gift that has made Paterson one of our most celebrated poets.
Addressed to friends and enemies, the living and the dead, children, musicians, poets, and dogs, these poems are as ambitious in their scope and tonal range as in the breadth of their concerns. Here, voices call home from the blackout and the airlock, the storm cave and the séance, the coal shed, the war, the highway, the forest, and the sea. These are voices frustrated by distance and darkness, which ring with the “sound that fades up from the hiss, / like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing, / now full of its only note, its lonely call.”
In 40 Sonnets, Paterson returns to some of his central themes—contradiction and strangeness, tension and transformation, the dream world, and the divided self—in some of the most powerful and formally assured poems of his career.
This collection from Don Paterson, his first since the Forward Prize–winning Rain in 2009, is a series of forty luminous sonnets. Some take a traditional form, while others experiment with the reader’s conception of the sonnet, but they all share the lyrical intelligence and musical gift that has made Paterson one of our most celebrated poets.
Addressed to friends and enemies, the living and the dead, children, musicians, poets, and dogs, these poems are as ambitious in their scope and tonal range as in the breadth of their concerns. Here, voices call home from the blackout and the airlock, the storm cave and the séance, the coal shed, the war, the highway, the forest, and the sea. These are voices frustrated by distance and darkness, which ring with the “sound that fades up from the hiss, / like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing, / now full of its only note, its lonely call.”
In 40 Sonnets, Paterson returns to some of his central themes—contradiction and strangeness, tension and transformation, the dream world, and the divided self—in some of the most powerful and formally assured poems of his career.
About the author
Don Paterson has written several collections of poems, including Nil Nil, God’s Gift to Women, Rain, The Eyes, and Landing Light, which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. He lives in Edinburgh.
Rate this eBook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Centre instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
