Paterson's insouciant bad-boy riffs, quickly told stories and fluent rhymes have made him a hit in Britain: the Scottish writer and jazz guitarist hits these shores with this wildly uneven, sometimes striking, U.S. debut. The collection opens with short, anecdotal poems from Nil Nil, the early-'90s book that made his name. As with his peers Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage, Paterson's skewed sonnets and shaggy-dog stanzas owe plenty to Paul Muldoon: Paterson distinguished his early poems through their laddish subjects, rhyming "blunt" with a ruder word in a poem about "an ancient, beat-up Phillips turntable." "Prologue" (from his second U.K. book, God's Gift to Women) seeks "that sunless pit of rancour and alarm/ where language finds its least prestigious form"; its couplets introduce disturbing poems about sex, drugs, soccer and Scotland (especially sex). The most effective of the lot begins by quoting a partner ("Is it normal to get this wet?") and ends with a striking visual memory: "the night we lay down on the flag of surrender/ and woke on the flag of Japan." Paterson's desire to capture hip lingo can clash, sometimes fruitfully, with his interests in loneliness and in dreams, notably in a lengthy two-part poem that likens a musty used bookstore to the Library of Alexandria. Paterson's latest work seems less distinctive: adapting Eastern Europeans or crafting descriptive filigree, he seems in search of a new, more mature approach. At his best, Paterson shows a young man trying to understand himself, his language, his id and his urban surroundings: readers who want to check out British poetry's recent populist turn could do a lot worse, but some readers may find these "white lie[s]" and hetero musings rather unamusing. (Oct.)
