The Arctic By Don Paterson

This is poetry of loss: of relationships, of a father, through midlife crisis, and even, in premonitions of nuclear winter, loss of the world. But it also glitters with wit, from that hyperbolic title to its complex web of homages. Spring Letter brilliantly adopts “MacNeice’s ragged antiphon / with its drunk and disorderly rhymes”, from his cusp-of-war Autumn Journal to rage against Russian expansionism. Urgently contemporary, this dense and serious collection glitters with exactitude.