The Fall at Home: New and Collected Aphorisms

Author: Paterson, Don

Brand: Penguin Random House

Edition: Main

Binding: hardcover

Number Of Pages: 224

Release Date: 04-10-2018

Details: Product Description
Aphorisms have been described as 'the obscure hinterland between poetry and prose' (New Yorker) - short pithy statements that capture the essence of the human condition in all its shades. In this New and Selected, master of the form Don Paterson brings the best examples from his two previous volumes together with ingenious new material relevant to today's world. Moving and mischievous, canny and profound - these wide-ranging observations of no more than one or two lines demonstrate that the aphorism is the perfect form for our times. Consciousness is the turn the universe makes to hasten its own end. * Agnosticism is indulged only by those who have never suffered belief. * Poet: someone in the aphorism business for the money.
Review
A hugely enjoyable collection. It takes a degree of chutzpah to pen a single aphorism, let alone a collection. It's a form that presupposes the author's wisdom and his right to bestow it. In the wrong hands an aphorism can either feel hectoring and judgmental or bloodless and obvious.
The Fall at Home offers the reader a bracing combination of the profound, the comic and the often hilariously self-revealing. If Cioran - nihilistic, rancorous, austere - was the great aphorist of the 20th century, Paterson may be his sunnier 21st-century reincarnation. ―
Spectator

'Paterson is wry, sardonic and sceptical; in the same lineage as writers such as Emil Cioran, Karl Kraus and Friedrich Nietzsche. There is a Calvinist haar over much of The Fall at Home, with the humour as a bitter spike lacing it... At its best, and most of it is very good indeed, it becomes both sly and profound.' ―
Scotsman BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Amidst sardonic observations and a few good jokes, we find musings of a philosophical or spiritual nature, reflections on ageing, the thoughts that pass through a writer's mind as they're working... this swirling stew of spontaneous thoughts offers an unguarded view of the workings of Paterson's brain in all its complex glory, laying bare the flashes of insight, whims, heresies and the conflicting and contradictory sides of his nature that are just as authentically him as any carefully-honed sonnet. ―
Herald

Paterson's deliciously dour nuggets of bitter wisdom are precise and grimly hilarious. -- Martina Evans ―
Irish Times BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Having single-handedly revived the aphorism, Don Paterson has been growing this superfine gritty collection for over a decade. ―
Irish Times
Book Description
The best of Paterson's 'clever, addictive and funny' aphorisms - including 40 pages of new material.
About the Author
Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His poetry collections include
Nil Nil,
God's Gift to Women,
Landing Light,
Rain and
40 Sonnets. He has published two books of aphorism,
The Book of Shadows and
The Blind Eye, as well as translations of Antonio Machado and Rainer Maria Rilke. He is also the author of
Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets,
Smith: A Reader's Guide to the Poetry of Michael Donaghy, and
The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre. 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 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and teaches at the University of St Andrews, where he is Professor of Poetry. 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.

EAN: 9780571338214

Package Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches

Languages: English