Don Paterson, winner of this year's £10,000 T.S. Eliot prize, doesn't just write poetry. He also teaches and plays in a band. He talks to Matt Seaton
The grey crewcut and short-cropped beard give him the look of a younger John Peel. The meeting place is appropriate in a way. Many of the poems in his new collection, Landing Light, seem to involve transitions, crossings and borders - and the changes people undergo in their journeying. But the collection is extraordinarily varied in tone and style: at times, accessible and immediate to the point of emotional rawness, at others, demandingly opaque in its dense allusiveness here classical in its language, there uncompromisingly Scottish in dialect.
Awarding the T.S. Eliot prize to Paterson in January, the judges' chairman, Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes, said: "Don Paterson offers what Eliot demanded - complexity and intensity of emotion, an intuitive understanding of tradition and what it makes possible, and, at the same time, a freshness that is like clear spring water. His work is superbly authoritative, deeply felt, playful and properly ambitious."
For all that he is clearly now a poet at the height of his powers, Paterson, 40, came to writing in a circuitous manner. His first passion was music. He has played guitar since his teens - some of his first gigs were with his dad, Russ, a semi-professional country and western artist in Dundee, where Don grew up.
But jazz was always his medium. He left school at 16 - a fact he prefers to play down these days: "It's my own fault: I put it in the first book [Nil Nil]. I was so obsessed with music, I couldn't wait to be a guitar player." To support himself, he took a job - the only regular one he has ever held, he claims - at Dundee's other chief cultural export, DC Thomson comics. This was where his dad also had a day job, as a process artist colour-inking the printing plates. Paterson the younger spent 10 months as a sub editor on Commando. "I hated it," he says. "I spent the whole time hiding in the toilets. In the end, I got the sack."
Rescue came in the form of Ken Hyder, another Dundee musician who had been running the Celtic jazz combo Talisker since the late 1960s. "He called my bluff," says Paterson. "He rang me up and said, 'There's a job in a band going: do you want it?'. " So in 1984, Paterson moved to London and "starved for four years - literally. If it hadn't been for the kindness of friends, I wouldn't have eaten."
Eventually, he enjoyed success with Lammas, another jazz ensemble "heavily inflected" with Scottish folk, writing material and recorded five albums during the 1980s and 1990s. But it was moving to London that also inspired him in another direction: he began to write.
"It was like a mechanism that was always there but just needed switching on," he says. "I came across Tony Harrison - those elegies about his mum and dad - and that really blew my mind. I read for a year after that." He soon started sending poems to magazines, and before long he was getting published.
Was he ambitious as a writer? "If you're thinking in terms of career-building, as a poet, you'll be disappointed," he replies. He talks fast and low, and often with a sardonic edge. Paterson's answer to why he left London and returned to Scotland is: "I was sick of my own accent. I only hear myself down here [in London\]." In the late 1990s, Edinburgh beckoned. "There was a feeling it was a good time to be there; there was a lot happening."
His writing has evidently flourished since his repatriation. With the £10,000 (€14,700) Eliot prize following hot on the heels of a £5,000 (€7,350) Whitbread award, I wonder whether a poet like him supports himself (and a family) through his writing.
"You don't," he says, emphatically. "You have to think of poetry as an amateur pursuit - in the best sense." As far as professional pursuits go, he works as poetry editor for Picador and teaches creative writing at St Andrew's University. The poems somehow insinuate their way into the busy domestic life he shares with his partner, three teenage stepdaughters and four-year-old twin boys in Kirriemuir, a small town about 15 miles north of Dundee.
When does he find time to write - let alone compose music and translate Rilke, his other two current pastimes? "It's a slow process," he acknowledges ruefully. "I get a few lines [of a poem] down, but then it never takes less than a year to complete." Perhaps this partly explains why his next publication will not be a collection of poems, but a book of aphorisms, entitled The Book of Shadows. Why aphorisms? "F--k knows," he says with a laugh.
But he is also serious: "They've got a real form to them. They're not very popular or fashionable in Anglophone culture - they are assertions, so they can sound hubristic: you sometimes find yourself thinking, 'Who the hell am I to say this?' But then, why not? You expect people to disagree. The point is to stir things up."
Perhaps it's that old jazz instinct: just when they think they've got you pegged, you change the tune, improvise. And it is that open-ended, communal experience that is, for Paterson, what poetry and music are about: "You're trying to give people something they can make their own."
Guardian Service
• Don Paterson, W.S. Merwin and Paul Durcan will read their work at the Poetry Now Festival at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin on March 26th at 8.30 p.m.
