Nil Nil
Nil Nil is a poetry collection that moves through language, absence, and play and emptiness. Its restrained voice lets image and repetition build emotional pressure.
Work Information
A compact poetry collection shaped by language and absence.
Nil Nil returns repeatedly to language, absence, and play and emptiness, building a collection from exact images and low-key tension. The result is controlled on the surface but lingering in its aftereffects.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Published
- 1995-07-01
- Pages
- 64 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13 x 0.6 x 19.8 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571168088
- ISBN-10
- 0571168086
- Price
- 2357 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction
Tricks of the mind and travails of the flesh, dream-life and class politics, mystery and music, sexual obsession and the consolations of drink - all play their part in Nil Nil, Don Paterson's first collection of poems. A formidable stylist, Paterson brings great skill and imaginative daring to bear on subject matter that is always of real importance, and frequently disturbing.
Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland. His first collection of poetry, Nil Nil (1993) won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. His following collection, God's Gift to Women (1997) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Don Paterson's poetry collection, Landing Light , won the 2001 Whitbread Poetry Award, and also received the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize - making him the first poet to have won the award twice. His latest poetry collection, 40 Sonnets, has been shortlisted for the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year award. He works as a musician and editor, teaches at the University of St Andrews, and lives in Kirriemuir, Scotland.
Reviews
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Don Paterson's first book of poems contains the seeds for the rest of his career, but in flawed terms; his usual embarassed erudition he here protests too much, and his versions or pseudo-translations (here after Rimbaud and Jorn-Erik Berglund) have far to go to his versions of Rilke's Sonnets to Oprheus and his 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' in Landing Light. It does, however, include the first (and best) part of the Alexandrian Library, continued in later collections God's Gift to Women and Landing Light. It's an obvious first collection, but it's still Don Paterson's first collection. Buy it, you fool.
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"Whatever I do with all the black is my business alone" Something of a very British life ..lemonade bottles, vinyl grooves, taxi ranks in the rain, high tower blocks. A nightshift somewhere clocking on in grey and a life lived in minor chords. What can't be said directly can be shown, and felt..a sense of slow failure we've all had at one 4am or another. Heavy eyes in a winter dawn that never quite becomes a day. Empty provincial train platforms, fumbling love in small hotels (in the shadow of Larkin), the moments in between captured like a 70s Polaroid..over exposed, too vivid..Dundee, Largs, Laphroaig (taste the peat smoke), slow cafe meditations on being a son, failing as a father, music, loss and verse itself. A disturbing end of century blues.
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Over-rated. Terribly so.