The poem teaches you that you're no more than an infinitely malleable, reprogrammable set of habits and characteristics: nothing, in other words.
— Don Paterson

In Don Paterson's first two books — Nil Nil (1993) and God’s Gift to Women (1997) — the poet invokes speakers of an explicitly or implicitly Scottish character who inhabit dramatic scenarios “characteristic of Scottish psychologies, or of what criticism makes of them,” as Douglas Dunn has said apropos of Scottish poetry in his introduction to The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry. In considering the "Scottish psychology" of Nil Nil, I will focus on the book’s dominant motif of doubling, concentrating primarily on the motif's various textual manifestations and the psychology of ambivalence and internal conflict that it suggests while investigating the motif's correlation to Scottish post-nationalism. Nil Nil’s double-consciousness may at first suggest the belated “split perception” or “double vision” of the colonized, but I will propose that it correlates instead to a post-nationalist rejection of a unified, “authentic” conception of self. I will suggest that the relative infrequency with which doubles appear in God’s Gift to Women speaks to the book’s more explicit Scottishness which, while never contradicting Nil Nil’s implicitly post-nationalist stance, train-tracks through the book, artificially securing a more cohesive, less fragmented voice. Marked by themes of integration and unified aggression, God’s Gift to Women repeatedly acknowledges and questions the artificiality of its project, not only in its self-reflexive opening and closing poems, but also at various points along the way.

With its “laddish,” working-class concerns, wry delivery, and formal wit, Paterson's poetry has been compared to that of the Movement poets, but the comparison only dimly captures his work’s character; in fact, to contrast his work with that of one of the Movement’s prime exemplars, Philip Larkin, proves instructive. While Paterson’s colloquial darkness may recall, in principle, Larkin’s territory, Paterson frequently explores this territory’s more uncanny, fantastic, and even nightmarish pockets. Both poets favor a dryly humorous, ironical approach, but Paterson's tone suggests Larkin only at his most extreme, as in his late “Aubade,” and not in his signature register of moderate, precise pessimism. Again, both poets exhibit strong formal ingenuity, but Paterson violates the Movement’s standards of restraint and understatement, indulging instead in ruggedly measured but extravagant passages, such as the following, from “Mooncalf”:

And so he died, in the bathtub of his bachelor
slum, watching the spat of grey jism
congeal before him, twitching like ectoplasm
as it knitted itself into shreds of tissue
and bobbed towards the blinding white shore
in a bluestone sea, his God-given, perfect issue.
The thing began to bleat, and soared
from the dirty bath water, like the sun.

Death, bachelordom, and wanking in rhyme all recall Larkin, but the stanza’s exuberant density and lexical breadth, as well as its horrific, surreal emergence, distinguish the writing as Paterson’s. While not in evidence in this particular passage, what further distinguishes Paterson’s work is a lightly entertained, un-programmatic self-reflexivity and an equally un-programmatic, open-ended spirituality. Moreover, the poems glitter with swatches of Scots and what used to be called “Scotticisms.” An accurate assessment of Paterson’s work must acknowledge these components, as well as significant influences outside the Movement, including Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, the Metaphysicals, and Jorge Luis Borges. And then, of course, there is the question of the poet’s Scottishness.

Commenting on the poetic embodiment of characteristically Scottish psychologies, Dunn writes:

A good deal of Scottish poetry is close to its potential audience. The poet as Everyman/woman is a cherished persona, or fact of poetic identity, as might be expected in a country where Robert Burns is a figure of national importance. G. Gregory Smith’s image of the grinning gargoyle beside the kneeling saint pictorializes the happy coexistence of the vulgar and the holy, the cruel and the kind, the low and the high, the demotic and the artistic, the anarchic and the ordered, the simple and the elaborate... [T]hese antithetical “characteristics” could tend to exclude poetry which illustrates them less obviously than an insecure taste might prefer. “Scottishness” is a quality open to crass exaggeration as well as more subtle forms of garbled excess.

Certainly the fusion of these opposing traits refuses to be classified as an exclusively Scottish phenomenon, but its marked presence in Scottish poetic tradition tracing back to and before the enormous popularity of Burns suggests that the fusion does, in some measure, express if not something of a typically Scottish character as begotten, than something of a typically Scottish character as made.¹ Ruth Padel bears in mind Burns’s craftsmanship and perennial subject matter — love, drink, and bawdiness — as well as his colorful public persona when pronouncing Paterson “a latter-day Burns” (Paterson’s theatrical reading style is often commented upon in print), but also important to Padel’s comparison is Burns’s famous patriotism, his assertion and preservation of Scottish identity. ²

Paterson's patriotism may be less overt than Burns’s, but his poems nonetheless affirm an identifiably Scottish “post-nationalist” attitude, a sensibility that cheerfully acknowledges what Paterson calls the Scots’s “entirely conscious taste for self-parody” which is, he says, “at last — through the benign insanity of the Tartan Army — receiving the international recognition it deserves.” The post-nationalist perspective challenges the status of nationalist mythologies, icons, and rituals, but does not foreclose on the possibility and importance of nationalist sentiment of a kind; whereas nationalism in its most simplistic casting literalizes its metaphors, post-nationalism demands that the metaphors that bind the community and shape public policy always be regarded as no more than that — as metaphors, often necessary, but never reified or beyond revision. While Paterson’s case for a national identity based upon global unimportance is perhaps too baldly ironic, his formula points to the connection between post-nationalist discourse and globalization even as it advertises rather than conceals the inherently ironic and self-parodic nature of post-nationalism. “Overtly imitating art more than life,” writes Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Parody, “parody self-consciously and self-critically points us to its own nature,” and the same can be said for post-nationalism, which acknowledges national identity as an artificial construct.

Paterson’s comment above, taken from an article on Scottish post-nationalism and the Scottish Independence Party in Cyprus News, correspond in spirit to the poems in Nil Nil and God’s Gift to Women. It is a spirit of theatricality and flamboyant overstatement, but one whose histrionic gestures seldom overwhelm Paterson’s delicately nuanced strains of thought. Elsewhere in the article, Paterson further assesses Scottish national identity:

It was Billy Connolly, I think, who made the observation that Scotland was the only country in the world where we give the kitsch junk churned out for the tourist market to each other as Christmas presents — tartan punnets of Edinburgh rock, tea towels of Skye, wee figurines of Rob Roy, and, one is forced to add these days, Billy Connolly albums... The kitsch iconography... depends on the existence of a kind of virtual Scotland, a phenomenon nowhere as depressing as some would make out. A virtual nation comes into being when a nation persists but is never ratified, and is a means of cryogenically preserving the dream of that nationhood until such point as the science exists to revive it.

The notion of Scottish identity as something to be buttressed if not built by the purchase of kitsch tokens of “Scottishness” and the “buying into” of a “virtual Scotland” has, of course, that familiar postmodern ring to it, recalling Robert Crawford’s introduction to his Identifying Poets, a study of self-imaging strategies deployed by twentieth-century poets who “construct for themselves an identity which allows them to identify with or to be identified with a particular territory.” To Crawford’s mind, it is the identifying poet’s realization of the constructedness of the poetic, textual self or selves that connects his or her project to the mainstream of contemporary critical thought. “Accompanying such a realization,” Crawford writes, “is the appreciation that the concerns of those poets who construct poetic selves that may be identified with particular territories are bound up with the shifting and constructing selves which lie at the heart of the Enlightenment itself and at the heart of post-Enlightenment Romantic poetry.” ³ Crawford is careful to note that taxonomic categories and interpretive paradigms are always of limited usefulness when applied to a poem (one can never provide a full account of an unabashedly polysemous text), and he offers the “identifying poet” merely as a conceptual model, a tool for further analysis. In Paterson's case, this model proves a particularly enlightening one, for in the course of an investigation of the ways in which Paterson constructs in his poetry specifically Scottish identities, the complicated heart of the work appears to unfold, if only to reveal within its fold another folded heart.

                                                  •

"Slamming Door: A real door slammed off-stage gives the best effect." Paterson's first book of poems, Nil Nil, a title that at once embodies the “nothingness” he sees as essential to identity and the doubling of that nothingness, begins with an epigraph, taken from an actual theatrical handbook (Michael Green’s Stage and Noise Effects), that opposes and equates reality and art. Paterson, citing another, questions reality’s status as the truth of which art is a mere copy, and posits it instead, in its “best effect,” as concomitant and indistinguishable from art. What is real is simultaneously other and itself; reality is complicit with its own simulation. But if simulation “threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary,’” as Baudrillard says in Sense and Simulacrum, then Paterson deflates that threat by foregrounding the distinction’s haziness at the onset. Instead of relegating that haziness to the background, or even anxiously barring its entrance, Paterson seats it at the head of the table. This theatrical gesture — its doubling consistent with both the Scottish tradition of the divided subject as well as the larger matter of identity’s artifactuality — informs the majority of the poems throughout Nil Nil, beginning with the first, “The Ferryman’s Arms,” in which the speaker visits a tavern while waiting for the ferry that will take him to an undisclosed destination:

About to sit down with my half-pint of Guinness
I was magnetized by a remote phosphorescence
and drawn, like a moth, to the darkened back room
where a pool-table hummed to itself in the corner.
With ten minutes to kill and the whole place deserted
I took myself on for the hell of it. Slotting
a coin in the tongue, I looked round for a cue —
while I stood with my back turned, the balls were deposited
with an abrupt intestinal rumble; a striplight
batted awake its dusty green cowl.

The poem begins with a litany of divisions, doublings, and paradoxes: from the “half-pint of Guinness” to magnetism’s attraction of opposites, from the “phosphorescence” emanating from what is “dark” to the autoerotic “pooltable [humming] to itself,” from the familiar confusion of agency built into the expression “to kill time” (we don't kill time, it kills us) to the speaker's nullification of his own identity inherent in declaring “the whole place deserted.” This amplification peaks in what becomes the poem’s central act, the self’s contest with the self, a match in which the self is always and inevitably both victor and vanquished, even in the occasion of a tie score, such as that in the book’s title, where opposition conflates with equation. Hellish overtones underscore the gravity of this playful confrontation; the poet capitalizes on the resemblance of the adversary to the Adversary, and indeed the speaker admits to taking himself on “for the hell of it.” Further contributing to the occasion’s psychodrama, the speaker, waiting for a ferry, likens himself to “a moth,” a classical figure for the soul, and puts a coin on the pool-table's “tongue” recalling the Greek custom of placing Charon's fee in the mouths of the deceased.

“A low punch with a wee dab of side, and the black / did the vanishing trick,” says the speaker of his victory, meaning that the eight ball is sunk and the Guinness finished, a double sense nodding to intoxication’s disordering of the senses. The poem’s last stanza extends that play, vertiginously conflating the speaker’s two means of transport — the stout and the waterway:

The boat chugged up to the little stone jetty
without breaking the skin of the water, stretching,
as black as my stout, from somewhere unspeakable
to here, where the foaming lip mussitates endlessly,
trying, with a nutter's persistence, to read
and re-read the shoreline. I got aboard early,
remembering the ferry would leave on the hour
even for only my losing opponent;
but I left him there, stuck in his tent of light, sullenly
knocking the balls in, for practice, for next time.

The speaker leaves his “losing opponent” or defeated double behind, but again, for whoever takes oneself on, there is no victory that is not simultaneously a vanquishing, no gain that is not a loss. The psychodramatic pitch of the encounter insinuates that losing to this opponent — one who has been granted no physical description, no presence because he is all absence, nothingness — leads to death, meaning that, in this match with one player, winning does as well. And here the death in question is the death of the idea of a unified, authentic self — boarding the ferry (an act of the posthumous) that “would leave on the hour / even for only [his] losing opponent” articulates the speaker’s awareness of what Paterson would call his “essential nothingness”; the ferry responds to an empty hold just as it does to the speaker’s presence on board, the speaker is equivalent to no one.

This “essential nothingness,” however, is almost always bound to a particular body, and the continuity of this residence enables one to speak of a unified self, of one’s body’s being, as Locke says in his Essay, “vitally united to this same thinking conscious self.” However far that “thinking conscious self” may travel in contemplating its own essential nothingness, it will always end up answering to the limits and exigencies of its body. Paterson addresses the biological integrity of self in the poem that follows “The Ferryman's Arms,” “Morning Prayer (after Rimbaud).” Based on Rimbaud’s “Oraison du soir” (Paterson reverses the original’s night into day), the poem enacts the reintegration of the self disintegrated in the previous poem, but insofar as the work embodying this reintegration of the self is itself a variation on the artwork of another, the terms of that reintegration confess to their own artificiality and borrowedness:

I spend my life sitting, like an angel at the barber's,
with a mug in one hand, fag in the other,
my froth-slabbered face in the gantry mirror
while the smoke towels me down, warm and white.

On the midden of desire, the old dreams
still hold their heart, ferment, gently ignite —
once, my heart had thrown its weight behind them
but it saps itself now, stews in its own juice.

Having stomached my thoughts like a terrible linctus
— swilled down with, oh, fifteen, twenty pints —
I am roused only by the most bitter necessities:

then, the air high with the smell of opened cedar,
I pish gloriously into the dawn skies
while below me the spattered ferns nod their assent.

The sedentary life spent facing an altered image of oneself mirrors the life of the writer, his self-scrutiny always a self-objectification, his would-be transcendental ego “like an angel” made mundane, debased in its rendering. Here, having a look at oneself means feeding on one’s own “terrible” thoughts, and the fruits precipitated by that vision fall as waste. “Je est un autre” wrote Rimbaud, famously, and Paterson would echo that sentiment, but with a distinct note of ambivalence not evident in the French, with a physical “nod [of] assent” like that of the “spattered ferns.” Being not oneself spelled, for Rimbaud, a communication with the Other and the sublime, and while this is true for Paterson as well, this being not oneself means, again, being nothing at all, a variety of extinction. If the source of much of the self’s practical unity is in its experienced rootedness in a particular body, “Morning Prayer” confronts the possibility that that rootedness, that embodiedness itself becomes, at times, indistinguishable from a custodianship to the mechanical exigencies of a material contraption.

Concern for the mechanicality of the body and of the self insofar as the body determines it informs Nil Nil’s “Heliographer,” in which a father teaches a son how to knock back drink:

I thought we were sitting in the sky.
My father decoded the world beneath:
our tenement, the rival football grounds,
the long bridges, slung out across the river.
Then I gave myself a fright
with the lemonade bottle. Clunk —
the glass thread butting my teeth
as I bolted my mouth to the lip.

Naw . . . copy me. It's how the grown-ups drink.
Propped in my shaky,
single-handed grip,
I tilted the bottle towards the sun
until it detonated with light,
my lips pursed like a trumpeter's.

The title “Heliographer” gently invites an autobiographical reading of the poem — Paterson is the son (or sun, Gk. helios) who is to write (Gk. graphein) — thereby inviting us also to identify the geography stretched out beneath the speaker as a representation of Scotland, further associating the “grownup” drinking prevalent in Paterson’s work with a topical Scottishness. Here, the body’s behavior is revealed to be a program of replication, as is identity generally: the father is copied by the son, and the son (or “sun”) is copied by the poem (“heliography” is a method of communication by means of reflecting sunlight or mirroring the sun). “I'm terrified of repeating myself,” Paterson has said, and this fear of repetition again suggests the anxiety that underlies a knowledge of the self as both replicable and replica, recalling Harold Bloom’s notion (in The Anxiety of Influence) of the “central problem for the latecomer” as one of repetition, “the horror of finding himself to be only a copy or replica.” The poem closes with the son’s “lips pursed like a trumpeter,” as if heralding his own arrival into adulthood. By revisiting and recasting psychically charged material, through repetition, the poet endeavors to master that horror, as Richard Rorty suggests in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: “The hope of such a poet is that what the past tried to do to her she will succeed in doing to the past: to make the past itself, including those very causal proceedings which blindly impressed all her own behavings, bear her impress.”

While “Heliographer” follows this psychic model, it complicates it. Even if the hinted-at repercussions of this drinking lesson are to take their toll, there is little immediate cause for horror in this intimate, dreamy scene in which reality is “decoded”: the speaker’s “fright,” self-administered with a mere lemonade bottle, is gingerly defused, and the poem’s division into octet and sestet identify the poem as an unrhymed sonnet, a form whose usual theme is not horror, but love. Rather than imposing a single perspective on its material, “Heliographer” implies both positive and negative emotional valences, allowing for alternate interpretations and a richer, more holistic representation of experience. The poem raises the “anxiety of influence” in order to portray a rounder relationship between the “latecomer” and his “precursor,” one less agonized than tenderly ambivalent. This retrieval and rewriting of the past in order to make it “bear one’s impress” resembles, in part, Elleke Boehmer’s description of historical reclamation by the colonized, which she describes (in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature) as the forging of “a restorative connection to that which colonialist discourse had denied — the internal life of the colonized, their experience as historical actors.” Yet the temptation to ally Paterson’s synthesis of a Scottish cultural identity, complete with split, to this mode of self-imaging should be resisted; Boehmer’s model applies more closely to the nationalist efforts of MacPherson and MacDiarmid than to Paterson’s selfconsciously indeterminate, post-nationalist writing.

It is a commonplace of criticism that poems entitled “Poem” often offer insights into the poetics of their authors, and Paterson’s “Poem (after Ladislav Skala)” suggests that “mastery” is very much at the heart of his project (note, too, its debt to another):

The ship pitched in the rough sea
and I could bear it no longer
so I closed my eyes
and imagined a myself on a ship
in a rough sea-crossing.

The woman rose up below me
and I could bear it no longer
so I closed my eyes
and imagined myself making love
to the very same woman.

When I came into the world
I closed my eyes
and imagined my own birth.
Still
I have not opened my eyes to this world.

With a mechanical shutting of the eyes, the speaker of “Poem” blocks the sensual world from impinging upon his vision only to duplicate that very world within the realm of his imagination. Locked in representation, the speaker generates, like a camera, mere copies of what’s beheld. However, by the last stanza, the sentence of his blindness is seen to extend as far back to the moment in which he “came into the world,” calling into question the possibility of his ever having seen anything at all. This apparent paradox articulates the truth of perception, but allowing that vision does provide the exterior some form of ingress into the subject, the shutter-like response of the speaker to that ingress, enacted in each stanza by the reiterated phrase “I closed my eyes,” reveals the mechanized, compulsive character of the poem’s subject. In each of the stanzas, the closing of the speaker’s eyes is an act of self-preservation, self-assertion, and mastery, all of which Freud identifies as “component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death.” Rather than suffer the exterior, the speaker deprives it of its potency, killing it off and substituting his own imagined copies of the images the exterior presents. In “Poem,” the speaker's creation of images in substitution for the world of the senses is a feat of poiesis turned to in moments of an intensity that threaten the speaker’s differentiation as a subject. But again, poiesis here results in the duplication of those very images associated with those threatening forces, but it allows the speaker to assume agency in his own dissolution. By claiming to be the author of this limitation, by repeatedly rendering himself a “closed I,” his weakness is refashioned into a strength. This is the poet’s enterprise, and “success in that enterprise — the enterprise of saying ‘Thus I willed it’ to the past,” says Rorty, paraphrasing Bloom and Nietzsche before him, is success in what Bloom calls “’giving birth to oneself.’” The speaker of the poem “imagined [his] own birth,” but to substitute an imagined birth for an actual birth effects, in a sense, the destruction of one’s real life, and in one of Nil Nil's last poems, “Bedfellows,” Paterson acknowledges the suicidal implications of doubling and identifying with that which is not there, i.e., with absence, nothingness.

Doubling and duality, frequently sexualized, appear throughout Nil Nil. A partial list: bathtub masturbation, as seen above, issues a monstrous “sun” (“Mooncalf”); a speaker meets his lover’s twin, and though she “swears they’re not identical,” he “slip[s] into her husband’s place” (“Sisters”); an acupuncturist’s treatment for procreativity-threatening “Orchitis” leads a speaker to confront his own “lifeless effigy”; the “ambition” of a fetus is “embarrassing” to an almost father (“Close”); parenthood appears as “no more than murder,” and a speaker says his unborn child “is hunting [him] down with a knife” (“Seed”); a speaker’s gothic tale of genetic determination creates a family of monsters, and he has “looked like all of them” (“Heredity”); an auto-erotic railway-platform speaker’s “recorded voice addresses its own echo,” as all the previously mentioned speakers do, in a manner of speaking. Like many post-Freudian representations of the duality, Paterson’s doubles are most often rendered ambiguously (either by means of obliquity and self-parody) and ambivalently — if they trouble the mask of the unified, authentic self, they do so while drawing attention to the practical necessity of that mask. Rather than undo identity altogether, the double ultimately reveals the requisiteness of its illusion — and also of its recognition as such. ⁴

                                                  •

While duality turns up in a handful of poems in Paterson’s second book, God’s Gift to Women, he structures the collection around a series of poems, dispersed throughout the book, that instead foregrounds integration and cohesiveness. Each of the poems in this series is titled with a specific time and a specific geographic location corresponding to stops on the Scotland’s Dundee-Newtyle railway, beginning with “10:45 Dundee Ward Road” and concluding with “14:50 Rosekinghall.” This patterning device identifies the poems with a particularly Scottish landscape without forsaking Nil Nil’s awareness of identity’s essential constructedness: not only is a railway itself an artificial structure, but Paterson’s endnotes inform us that the Dundee-Newtyle railway was “dismantled in the 1960s.” The series, then, suggests a reclamation that is self-consciously elegiac and restorative. However, this is accompanied by a narrowing of perspective and aggressive singularity of voice that announces itself in the collection’s opening poem, “Prologue”:

A poem is a little church, remember,
you, its congregation, I, its cantor;

so please, no flash, no necking in the pew,
or snorting just to let your neighbour know

you get the clever stuff, or eyeing the watch,
or rustling the wee poke of butterscotch

you’d brought to charm the sour edge off the sermon.
Be upstanding. Now: let’s raise the fucking tone.

Here the poem's voice flexes in tight couplets, flaunting its authority; the reader, inscribed into the order, faces one imperative after another, diminishing as the cantor’s dictatorial presence mounts. The cantor demands that his singularity not be undermined by photography (“no flash”), curbing the parish’s self-determination; fixed identity encourages a strictness, lays a law and enforces it, infringes upon the private sphere (“no necking”) as well as the communal (“no... snorting to let your neighbor know / you get the clever stuff”). Parading what Crawford calls the “Calvinist loathing” found in the collection, Paterson winks at the poem’s assertive Scottishness with a “wee poke” (in Scots, a little paper bag) filled, of course, with butterscotch. A professed dissolver of ego, Paterson has said in “The Dilemma of the Poet” that “it’s fine for the ego to drive you to the gig, God help you if it’s the ego that’s up on stage.” “Prologue” satirizes and celebrates that very blunder. This is ego at the wheel, and he’s conducting the “coach” (a reference to the trains throughout) on “spiritual transport... beyond the snowy graveyard of the page” — and, to ego’s surprise, to its own inevitable exorcism, its own naughting into the divine. The poem ends with no punctuation, just dissolve:

My little church is neither high nor broad,
so get your heads down. Let us pray, Oh God

This church is neither the High Church (the conservative faction of the Anglican Church) nor the Broad Church (a liberal faction of the late nineteenth century), but a congregation of the ego, of the (supposed) unified, authentic personality that Paterson resists strenuously, even — and especially — from within its walls. The speaking voice here belongs not to the poet, but to the poem; in the afterword to The Eyes (1999), Paterson writes, “Poems are custom-built churches in which the poem’s own voice — or the poet's, if he or she mistakenly conflates the two — can sing freely.” But no freedom can be granted without raising the specter of suppression, and Paterson acknowledges the autocratic potential of this singular voice: it is, he continues, “so specifically calibrated to maximise the resonant potential of that voice, that another voice, upon entering the same space, is almost guaranteed to fall flat.” The poem “Les Six” momentarily broadens the book’s terrain with explicitly French material, as if only to underscore the Scottish emphasis throughout, but it elaborates upon this theme. Ostensibly commemorating a series of six group photographs of Les Six, the French iconoclastic composers of the 1920s, the poem, like “Prologue,” is written in rhyming couplets, each of which begins by locating the group’s charismatic intellectual leader, Jean Cocteau, and culminates in the explanation for another member’s absence or distortion in the photograph:

                                     (i)

with Cocteau (far left); Georges Auric was briefly sent
to Coventry following the ‘umbrella' incident.

                                     (ii)

with Cocteau (second from the left), in the ‘Chinese'
parlour, chez Laloy. One assumes Poulenc sneezed.

Cocteau's position graduates in each of these photos from the “far left” to the “far right,” a movement from the liberal to the reactionary as the impresario overwhelms the lesser members, ending with Durey, who is “represented by his photograph,” an identity-undoing replica. He, like another voice entering a poem, has “fall[en] flat.”

Like “Prologue” and “Les Six,” poems throughout God’s Gift to Women explore the troublesome implications of artificial cohesiveness, at times offering examples of what Dunn, discussing recent Scottish poetry, has called “over-strenuous instances of a ‘Scotch self.’” These “instances” says Dunn, “can result in the staging of highly unpleasant caricatures. Nationality, and its chum, patriotism, encourage unedifying hyperbole.” In “Homesick Paterson, Live at the Blue Bannock, Thurso” and “Postmodern,” the book’s only poems written in Scots, we encounter two such caricatures, but Paterson isn’t blind to his exaggerations — he’s winking at them. Markedly different in tone and texture from the book’s other poems (they're casual, yarn-spinning, feistier, less erudite), “Homesick Paterson” and “Postmodern” enact a Scottishness that one might readily declare “over-strenuous,” but Paterson takes pains to foreground their artifice, either formally (with the predominantly iambic pentameter envelope and Sicilian quatrains of the former) or thematically (with the playful self-referentiality in both). Despite the poem’s orderly structure, the speaker of “Homesick Paterson,” presumably a version of the poet himself, suffers a disorder — pathological nostalgia is nowhere the topic of the poem’s narrative yarn but is instead its self-conscious diagnosis. Paterson has his cake and eats it, too, a privilege of parody and duality. In “Postmodern,” a flat Scottish caricature proves complicit in his flattening: he inadvertently videotapes and then distributes his own masturbating image, commodified and depthless as the tissues in the “big box o' Scotties” by his side. Here, again, the title is diagnostic — the poem is less a precis on the postmodern than another pesky case of it.

And diagnostic, too, is the title “Imperial,” whose poem presents a speaker whose sexual conquest recapitulates the self-justifying pursuits of empire. Driven by an unexamined desire, the speaker’s rhetoric masters not only the virgin whom he educates and exploits, but himself as well:

Is it normal to get this wet? Baby, I’m frightened —
I cover her mouth with my own;
she lay in my arms till the storm-window brightened
and stood at our heads like a stone.

After months of jaw jaw, determined that neither
win ground, or be handed the edge,
we gave ourselves up, one to the other
like prisoners over a bridge

and no trade was ever so fair or tender;
so where was the flaw in the plan,
the night we lay down on the flag of surrender
and woke on the flag of Japan.

The “flaw in the plan” is a flaw in the speaker, his perspective sharpened by instinct to the point of self-serving myopia: the “surrender” here is not mutual, but one-sided, no matter how his phrasing glosses over that fact (“we gave ourselves up, one to the other”). Though allotted a voice in the poem’s first line, the lover/opponent is quickly silenced by the speaker’s own mouth and, of course, his textual voice. The note of “spuriously graceful authority” that Padel detects in the line “and no trade was ever so fair or tender,” with its nostalgic ring harkening back to the age of empire, proves false — “this is a made up quotation: the point is the appearance of authority.” Here again, assuming fixedness and singularity (of purpose, perspective, identity) culminates in the suppression of the other, not only in the subjected, but in the subject, too; unable to reflect upon himself as an other, or to consider the other in himself, the un-empathetic speaker is blind to the fact that self-gratification is the true object of his pursuit. And what is submerged and examined will always erupt, in time, and often in violence, as seen in the volume's “The Scale of Intensity,” where what begins as “Not felt” ends with “Damage total.”

Without reprieve, a poetry that repeatedly concerns itself with the fragile fiction of identity, its diseases and disasters, risks despair, and indeed, Crawford has declared the tone of God’s Gift to Women “kamikazily bleak.” But Paterson does offer reprieve. Although the greater part of the collection enacts the disintegration of artificially maintained unity, he concedes that unity and tradition, provided they always be acknowledged as constructed and nonessential, can offer what Crawford calls a “life-support-system.” “Writing,” says Crawford in “Deep Down in the Trash,” is usually a solitary activity, but encouragement and stimulation often come from knowing oneself part of a historical and geographical community of voices.” While the solitariness of the writer is worth qualifying (it is merely bodily, as Paterson’s many epigraphs and renditions of others’s work remind us), the absorption of the lone poet into the collective, or the admission of the collective into the poet, need not necessarily be figured as an anxious dissolution. This integration can be given a positive valence, as seen in “A Private Bottling,” a monologue whose speaker drowns his romantic sorrows in whisky arranged in “a chain of nips / in a big fairy-ring; in each square glass / the tincture of a failed geography.” As the elemental forces of place contribute to the determination of the subject, so each whisky bears the traces of the region that it hails from; the liquor’s character reflects not only the flavor of the malted barley, spring water, and yeast used to make it, but also that of the oak in which it ages, and even more importantly, that of the local air breathed into it through the pores of the casks. This “chain of nips,” then, links the speaker not only to the land’s “dwindled burns and woodlands, whin-fires, heather, / the sklent [slant] of its wind and salty rain,” but also to the people shaped by that land, “the love-worn habits of its working-folk, / the waveform of their speech, and by extension / how they sing, make love, or take a joke.” Drink, the working class, language, sex, song, and play: all of Paterson’s interests are present in the whisky, and carefully the drinker reads them there, the slow, age-old craft of the single-malt’s production an analog to the poem's own:

I will suffer each fierce kiss after kiss
letting their gold tongues slide along my tongue
as each gives up, in turn, its little song
of the patient years in glass and sherry-oak,
the shy negotiations with the sea,
air and earth, the trick of how the peat-smoke
was shut inside, like a black thought.

Each nip’s “little song” unites the drinker (or reader) to “the whole clan,” if not directly, then at least obliquely, “in spirit.” “This is no romantic fantasy” the speaker protests, and the toast he raises isn’t to “love, or life, or real feeling,” but to “their sentimental residue,” their traces left in the memory, their effects on the formation of the subject.

”Everything is in everything,” the speaker of “A Private Bottling” knows. “It is a matter of attunement,” meaning that you can drink your whisky without attending to the idiosyncrasies of its provenance, without appreciating how, like a poem, “each glass holds its micro-episode / in permanent suspension” until “revivified by a suave connoisseurship / that deepens in the silence and the dark / to something like an infinite sensitivity.” But it is through an attendance to the particular, even when the bottling is “private,” that one is able to connect with the community, to the “life-support system” Crawford speaks of, and ultimately, to the “infinite” or sublime.

Perhaps this “will to connect” sheds light on Paterson’s preference for cohesive syntax at a time when many writers committed to an understanding of the self as contingent and fragmentary practice correspondingly fractured syntax to reflect that understanding. Such radical disruption might be said to portray directly the condition of the self behind the mask of convention; it might also be said to embody the subject’s alienation and to commemorate extemporaneous, associative, and disjunctive thinking; it might also be said to reflect the nature of experience unregulated by habituation and acquired or innate sense-making filters. (This list is not exhaustive.) While strategies of syntactic disruption have themselves become conventions within poetic discourse, they exist in tension — if not contention — with the socially prescribed conventions of other discourses. Paterson frequently pushes the boundaries of syntax, but he eschews such radical disruption; for his purposes, conventional notions of national and personal identity are best examined by self-consciously perpetuating and complicating them, best critiqued by representing them in crisis. Moreover, as seen in such poems as “A Private Bottling,” an engagement with the speech, habits, and traditions of a community open up the possibility for sympathetic connection and an awareness of the interdetermination of all subjects.

Notes

¹ Similarly, audience-mindedness and the positing of the poet as “Everyman/woman,” cherished or ignored, are not watermarks of an essential Scottishness, but they, too, are established elements of a tradition, one articulated vociferously and perhaps most definitively by Burns, whose clean break from the elevated and exhausted English neoclassicism of his contemporaries — a severance allowing him to formulate an aesthetic that embraced Scottish folklore, folksong, and common experience — was accompanied by a well-documented self-fashioning and a keen awareness of the role of poet as rambling public spokesperson.
² Burns’s embrace of Scottishness is not only implicit in his turning away from the eighteenth century’s dominant English poetic mode, but also evidenced by the fact that Burns’s most passionate and lasting work was written in Scots and not in English, and also by his having dedicated the last twelve years of his short life to the compilation of The Scots Musical Museum and The Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs.
³ “I think one often writes sustained by necessary myths,” admits Paterson in “The Dilemma of the Poet,” and if the myth of the unified, “authentic” and non-contingent personal identity, provides him with any sustenance, it is because he self-consciously “tricks himself” into believing it. Addressing the possibility that Scotland’s constitutional complaints might be looked upon as “a rationalized façade for much deeper and more emotional agendas,” Paterson has said, “It's about pride; pride that you simply exist... What's more important is that a nation convinces itself of the fact of its renaissance — it might be all a con trick, but in the past we've conned ourselves into servility too.” No doubt the kind of servility Paterson has in mind traces back to the Union of Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707, whereby an independent Scotland ceased to exist and following which, in Dunn’s words, there began a “slow sundering” of a “distinctive Scottish psyche.” Efforts to resuscitate Scottish cultural identity, stimulated by the loss of independence, include such “con tricks” as James Macpherson’s infamous Ossianic epics, in which the patriotic call to forge a tradition culminated in a forgery. (This is not to overlook such early nationalistic works of the Middle Ages, such as John Barbour’s The Bruce and Blind Harry’s Wallace, both of which respond to the 1296-1328 war of independence against England.) A century and a half later, after experimenting in the Scots vernacular, Hugh MacDiarmid, a founder of the National Party of Scotland in 1928 and key figure in the Scots literary renaissance in the 1920s, “realized that the language of his poetry should externalize the Scottishness of his mind and imagination,” according to Dunn. MacDiarmid chose to write in a Synthetic Scots, a vernacular assembled from the dialects of the several districts of Lowland Scotland.
⁴ The relationship between the double or duality and identity expressed here bears spiritual resemblance to Crawford’s discussion, in Devolving English Literature, of the need to push beyond deconstruction in the shaping of cultural identity: “If post-structuralist thought deconstructs ideologies of authority [and authorship], then, since it does this for all ideologies, its practical effect is often to maintain the status quo rather than to support any counter movement. Often what small or vulnerable cultural groups need is not simply a deconstruction of rhetorics of authority, but a construction or reconstruction of a ‘usable past,’ an awareness of a cultural tradition which will allow them to preserve or develop a sense of their own distinctive identity, their constituting difference.”

Verse

Editors: Brian Henry, Andrew Zawacky
Managing Editors: Henry Hart, Brett Fletcher Lauer

---

Poetry Daily / Amazon.com

Selected books available by Don Paterson:
The White Lie: New and Selected Poetry — Paperback

Selected books available by Timothy Donnelly:
Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit — Paperback

Search Poetry Daily / Amazon.com for other books: