Zonal
Regular price
€17.50
Don Paterson's latest collection of poetry starts from the premise that the crisis of mid-life may be a permanent state of mind. Zonal is an experiment in science-fictional and fantastic autobiography, with all of its poems taking their imaginative cue from the first season of The Twilight Zone (1959-1960), playing fast and loose with both their source material and their author's own life. Narrative and dramatic in approach, genre-hopping from horror to Black Mirror-style sci-fi, 'weird tale' to metaphysical fantasy, these poems change voices constantly in an attempt to get at the truth by alternate means. Occupying the shadowlands between confession and invention, Zonal takes us to places and spaces that feel endlessly surprising, uncanny and limitless.
Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His previous poetry collections include Nil Nil, God's Gift to Women, Landing Light, Rain and 40 Sonnets. He has also published three books of aphorisms, translations of Antonio Machado and Rainer Maria Rilke and several books of criticism and theory including an ambitious ars poetica, The Poem. 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 the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, and since 1997 he has been Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. For many years he has also worked as a jazz musician and composer. He lives in Edinburgh.