Don Paterson

“I can see exactly what not to do at the moment. No doubt through the usual process of elimination I'll arrive at my favourite strategy of total paralysis.”

“Inconveniently, books are all the pages in them, not just the ones you choose to read.”

“While you spoke, it reached into the room switching off the mirrors in their frames and undeveloping your photographs;it gently drew a knife across the threadsthat tied your keepsakes to the things they kept”

“Fate's book, but my italics.”

“A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying especial care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem's end.”

“Lurking behind this connecting silence is a brooding suspicion over the extent to which the perceptual user-preferences of the human animal limit and distort its experience of reality, and the consequently unreliable nature of much of its thought. Poetry is the means by which we correct the main tool of that thought, language, for its anthropic distortions: it is language's self-corrective function, and everywhere challenges our Adamite inheritance - the catastrophic, fragmenting design of our conceptualizing machinery - through the insistence on a counterbalancing project, that of lyric unity.”