Don Paterson’s collection is named from a bar frequented by the survivors of several kinds of apocalypse and the poems of his new collection nod to a range of people and encounters, coming together to form the resulting adventurous and ambitious read. You can read a duo of poems exclusively at Books from Scotland below.

Extracts taken from The Arctic
By Don Paterson
Published by Faber & Faber

Air Guitar

This year we’ve had to arm his good guitar
with super-lights, harp-wire and gossamer –
but now there’s nothing at his fingertips
God only knows the chords that lie below
the vague reflexive clutchings that he makes
when I put the neck into his severed hands.

Letter to a Young Poet
after Ladislav Skála

We too thought our contemporaries were doing vital work.
We’d quote each other in our epigraphs as if we were Krasko.
Because the Writer’s Union had decreed a cult of youth
we were awarded the greatest prizes for our very first books.
We denounced the old and shamed them for their politics.
In our forties, half of us had given up and now did other things.
In our fifties, there were maybe ten of us left standing,
read only by each other, and living off handouts from the state.
By sixty, we had given up on the pretence
that we could understand one word of the poetry of the young.
In our seventies, we wrote very little of any actual worth
and by the time we were eighty we were all dead.

Copyright: Don Paterson, reproduced courtesy of Faber Published on 4 August 2022

The Arctic by Don Paterson is published by Faber & Faber, priced £14.99.