I can think of only a few things more saddening than picking up a book, seeing that the back page is crowded with praise from people who’s own work you enjoy, and then reading the book and asking, at the end of it all, What were they talking about?

(And more specifically, for those of us under 30 or so: What’s worse than feeling, when we see great older writers praise something, like it’s one more thing that we’ll understand "when we get older". Am I the only one who fears and hates and is troubled by the phrase?)

So that was the situation when I read Don Paterson’s The White Lie, a book that collects a sampling from three other books, with some new poems at the end. I mean Billy Collins, Charles Simic, and Zadie Smith couldn’t all have misread, could they have?

Well, no, they didn’t. Paterson’s book has some amazingly bright flares, some sentences that’ll absolutely make you stand up and look around the room, checking to see if the whole world’s coming for the book because of those few lines. And there are enough forms and styles here to keep anyone satisfied, although it’s a bit Anglophilic, in language and tone, throughout.

Paterson can do a short, rhymed poem easily:

Filter

Thrown out in a glittering arc
as clear as the winterbourne,
the jug of Murphys I threw back
goes hissing off the stone.

Whatever I do with all the black
is my business alone.

He has the generosity that’s imperative to good poetry, but also the phrase-turning agility that makes reading him, if not fun, then at least not dull, not plodded and understood, if only because he takes chances.

But when the matter is a short poem, it’s a tricky business, that taking chances bit. Because no matter the amount of compression and density an author crams into eight lines, if that ninth line feels contrived the whole thing just fell apart. This was the real problem I had with Paterson’s poetry. Beautiful writing? Check. Subjects diverse and engaging? Yes. Some cohesion to the small poems? Mostly, no.

His poem Advice ends with To be honest with you,/none of this is terribly important. Were he easing some tension, or even creating any with the line, it might work. Instead he’s pawning off a poem that, in its breathy meandering, says nothing, and then tells you at the end of it that it means nothing.

And there’s a whole, wide and vast middle territory between these two examples, many poems that, maybe, like some struck chord will really ring for you because of some small element that makes the poem a personal and subjective experience instead of something simply in a book. I hope so.

Paterson fills almost a third of his book with longer poems, poems that stretch from image to smell to taste and touch, wandering over everything he’s saying. I don’t mean to imply they’re not well constructed—some of them are so well constructed you get the sense, by the end of the poem, that he spent more time and energy on form than content.

It is during these long poems that Paterson really stretches out, and where his risk-taking and daringness pays off. There’s an excitement about the longer ones that makes you wonder, for a page, maybe even more, just what he might do. Line or page breaks don’t matter, as he steers the words into amazingly dissimilar but complementary examples and scenes and sensations.

Which may be the only salvation anyone ever really earns in writing poetry. Maybe the willingness to keep every sense receptive and make tracks into the thickest of darknesses is good enough. For all the poems that Paterson didn’t pull off, there are plenty of examples of longer ones he did, where predictability and boredom and cliche drop to reveal, there in the dark, the light that he and only he could see.

- Weston Cutter

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