There is a scene in the black-and-white sci-fi TV programme The Twilight Zone, created by Rod Serling, where a character is unmasked only to reveal a second mask beneath the first. Don Paterson’s new collection, partly inspired by the 1959-1960 first series of the show, is rather like this. In its opening pages, he issues a teasing warning. He writes that readers should not be deceived by what might be assumed to be his confessional tone: “It isn’t, except on those occasions when it is.” The first thing one has to feel comfortable with is the knowledge that Paterson will not wear his heart on his sleeve, that he is more likely to borrow a sleeve than to let us know, directly, what it is he is feeling and that any emotional authenticity – or the fleeting confessions to which he alludes – are to be dispensed via a fantastical autobiographical hybrid, a mix of disclosure and disguise.
The idea of the collection – which sounds barmy at first – is of the midlife crisis as a permanent state of mind, akin to being marooned on some godawful planet where your other half is likely, at least some of the time, to be an alien. This, I thought, after taking a brief look at the poems, has to be self-indulgent baloney. But as soon as I settled down to read these poems properly, I felt different: I love the collection’s minutely wrought originality and the way that even dismaying subjects – loneliness, insecurity, botched relationships – have hilarious side-effects. The book made me laugh aloud. It is bracing to see Paterson – a dab hand at form (40 Sonnets won the 2015 Costa poetry prize) – returning with eloquence and vim to rhythms of speech. And it is worth adding that, although The Twilight Zone is brilliant, you need not be acquainted with it to enjoy the poems: they speak for themselves.
The opening poem, Death, is a show-stopper – as it needs to be, given its subject. Death is an abject fellow, accustomed to helping himself to the clothes of people he has dispatched. He cannot resist the poem’s smartass salesman narrator who tries to sell him “cool new things”. Death proves acquisitive and fancies “a black Fedora, a snakeskin belt, the silk tie with the Mondrian design.” It appears he is having some crisis of his own. Perhaps he has been around too long – Paterson explores the perils of eternal life elsewhere (especially in The Deal).
A Crucifixion is another cracker of a poem – although I’m not sure “poem” is the word. It opens like a wry short story:
“I was gluing your old crucifix back together, a moment that, on
reflection,
perfectly summed up our entire relationship; though because
our relationship, on reflection,
consisted of literally nothing but moments that perfectly
summed up our entire relationship
technically it wasn’t a relationship per se…”
He gets back to the task in hand and, while gluing Jesus, describes himself “thinking absently: why the fuck am I sticking him back on…”
What follows touches on the idea that when a symbol swallows reality whole, what remains is “neither real nor unreal, but folding into and through itself / forever, like an origami flexagon, a black hole”. And that brings us to The Thing – atypically short yet telling. It involves much urgent, funny and unsettling conversational rummaging. There is Pinteresque relish in the highlighting of Chester-le-Street, although we get no story out of the dog biscuit. Instead, we have the key to it all: the origami flexagon, the black hole – the sense of midlife as an empty pocket with something crucial (but what exactly?) missing.
• Zonal by Don Paterson is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
