An early musical inspiration “looked disconcertingly like a reflection of Rolf Harris’s actual soul”, while “the David Brent of jazz” plays like “ Mr Bean practising air piano”.

Toy Fights” – Chicago Review of Books Avoiding Boredom in “Toy Fights” – Chicago Review of Books

Paterson describes himself as a “radical centrist” but has little interesting to say about the “alt-right” or the “BLMers” to the left of him, both of which he dismisses completely. Fans of Nil-Nil and God’s Gift To Women will likely get a sense of satisfaction in connecting dots between anecdotes in this memoir and poems like ‘Elliptical Stylus’ and ‘Dundee Ward Road. In particular, he is cross at “the trendy left” who, amid campaigning for women’s and gay rights, “almost never think about the f*cking poor”. It was that and he got walked into an electorally toxic position on Brexit (reversing his 2017 position, which was the only electorally viable stance). In other words, twenty minutes of violence without pretext might be as real as it gets precisely because it explodes the idea that one progresses neatly from childhood to real life.Toy fights” were mass brawls, begun without any reason by one child’s announcement that fighting should start. And it asserts its value as no more than—but also no less than—a good way to pass time on a cold winter’s night.

Toy Fights: A Boyhood by Don Paterson – The Irish Times

For all the book sets out, from the preface on, a hatred of social media, this book - particularly in its footnotes and asides - bares distinct traces of the extremely online. It’s a book conscious of the register in which it is a writing, willing to unpack itself as it goes along.His father died with dementia three years ago: “His last coherent sentence was: ‘Alexa, play Lyle Lovett’. The game was over long before December 2019 - he could have won a majority of 50 that night and still wouldn’t have lasted the year in office (even without covid). Here, for example, is his description of how he prepared for his first school dance: “I had never been to a disco, but was determined not to let that show. For Paterson, “real life” means being a poet, and as he explains in the chapter detailing his hospitalization, poetry requires recognizing the nothingness at the core of human existence. In lengthy digressions he fulminates against middle-class “fake leftists” or everything to do with social media.