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The Poem
Illuminating and authoritative treatise on ‘how a poem works’, from the multi-award-winning poet, editor and professor of poetry.
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Don Paterson is not only one of our great poets, but also an esteemed authority on the art of poetry. The Poem is a treatise on the art of poetry in three sections – one on lyric, the music of poetic speech; one on sign, and how poetry makes its unique kind of sense; and one on metre, the rhythm of the poetic line.
A tremendous achievement.
Don Paterson is one of the most talented poets working today; he is also an editor of poetry, a reader, someone intrigued by linguistics and philosophy and neurology, and is therefore the perfect polymath to write a book on how we read poetry ... ornery, profound, engaging, infuriating.
An intimidatingly exhaustive virtuoso performance.
By the end of The Poem, I found myself reading lines of poetry over and over, exploring with a new intensity their sense and sound, right down to the most seemingly inconsequential grammar mark or phoneme. That is a sign of a good teacher: someone who can help others improve their own understanding of the world.
Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes and, on two occasions, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. He is Professor of Poetry at the University…
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