Don Paterson

“While you spoke, it reached into the room switching off the mirrors in their frames and undeveloping your photographs; it gently drew…

— Don Paterson

“Fate's book, but my italics.”

— Don Paterson

The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself ... Poetry is therefore primarily…

— Don Paterson

“Lurking behind this connecting silence is a brooding suspicion over the extent to which the perceptual user-preferences of the human animal limit…

— Don Paterson

“forget the ink, the milk, the blood - all was washed clean with the flood we rose up from the falling waters…

— Don Paterson

There's no fury more righteous than that of a sinner accused of the wrong sin.

— Don Paterson

We could easily have evolved eyelids thick enough to keep out the light, but we still need to see the shadows fall…

— Don Paterson

“A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a…

— Don Paterson

So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this reader for this additional investment - text that…

— Don Paterson

“Critics all have this idea that authors inhabit another dimensional realm, right up to their first smack in the mouth - which…

— Don Paterson

Imagine your shadow burning off the page / As the dear world and the dead word disengage

— Don Paterson

We turn from the light to see.

— Don Paterson

No fury more righteous than that of a sinner accused of the wrong sin.

— 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…

— Don Paterson

Mediocre art is far worse than bad art. Bad art does not waste our time.

— Don Paterson

This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem…

— Don Paterson

Lakoff's idea is that most of our thought is guided by underlying conceptual mappings between two domains that share some content, that…

— Don Paterson

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

— Don Paterson

Poetry, unlike music, is a meta-art, and relies upon non-physical structures for the production of its effects. In its case, the medium…

— Don Paterson