MORE than 50 people gathered in Gunnerside’s magnificent Wesleyan church to hear Don Paterson read and talk entertainingly about his work as a poet.

Paterson is also a jazz guitarist, though an injury to a finger has prevented him from playing recently, and an academic in the school of English in St Andrews University .

He read from earlier and current work, introducing and putting into context 20 of his poems, and then answered questions. He touched lightly on his methods of working: sitting up late, using the mundane, working with rhyme, because he regards it as fundamental to language and allows access to memory and the unconscious.

He told the audience that research in neural linguistics demonstrates a connection between sound and meaning, that a good poem, will tell the writer “things you didn’t know you knew”, and that he uses the sonnet form to link “two things that dinna go together”.

Listening to this award-winning poet was stimulating, entertaining, moving and life-affirming.

Susan Perkins