Book reviews: Zonal, by Don Paterson | The Martian’s Regress, by JO Morgan

There is sometimes a very curious coincidence in reading, and I don’t believe in coincidence. These two collections, by important Scottish poets, are both “science-fictional”. That in itself is not new – the late Edwin Morgan often used the tropes of that genre. Paterson’s collection mostly riffs around episodes of the first series of The Twilight Zone, while JO Morgan’s long-form poem is about a Martian returning to the Earth from which they had once migrated. Both are startling books – I read both three times before considering this review. As I did so, I found a synchronicity that was almost shuddering.

Don Paterson PIC: Geraint Lewis/Shutterstock

Here is a small example. In Zonal, Paterson describes one narrator – it would be gauche in the extreme to say “the author” – confessing that “in the early years I did indeed smash every mirror I could find with a little hammer / that I carried around for this purpose”. In The Martian’s Regress, Morgan writes of his strange protagonist: “The mirror misted… He shattered the glass / His image multiplied”. Both collections feature poems that are obsessed with crucifixes. In Paterson, with his trademark dry wit, it involves trying to put a new nail into a broken crucifix, an “origami flexagon”, where he worries over it being “a real nail, I mean, as well as the illustration of a nail, one which served the twin function / of representing the agonised stigma, and actually stopped the poor wee gobshite falling off his stick”. In Morgan, in the poem “Desecrations”, the Martian launches an iconoclastic fury against a long abandoned cathedral, but spares the crucifix since “due punishment was always worthy / Of prominent display / A warning for others never to do / Whatever foolish things this man had done”. In seems that in poetry which is engaging with science-fiction, theology creeps in everywhere. Both, as well, have poems about synthetic female companions: Paterson invokes the “blinking tiers of her circuitry”; Morgan describes her “wipeably clean” body and how the “womanly shell with the woman removed” is “bloodless thoughtless yet obedient”. There are strange parallels indeed.


Neither book is particularly easy to review, as the effects are cumulative. Some of the poems contradict the others; both have narratives with twists, so that it is difficult to convey the whole without quoting each collection in its entirety. You do not have to be an aficionado of The Twilight Zone to “get” Paterson’s book, although for those of us who are, it is a super-sized Easter egg chock-full of winks, raised eyebrows, glances and clever re-tunings. Formally, the poems are something of a divergence from his rather more tightly structured previous work. Here, the lines extend with a kind of hectic abandon, so much so that they feel like behind yarned to by an exceptionally loquacious individual. “I’ll tell you a story” might be the beginning of all stories. It still keeps the philosophical rigour of previous works. 


In fact, the opening credits of the TV show might well stand as an epigraph: “It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.” 


JO Morgan PIC: James Shaw/REX/Shutterstock

So we get the characteristically mordant Paterson tone through the lens of popular culture, as in the lines: “Anyway, if you think your life has little meaning now – / and I know you do, or you wouldn’t have answered the ad – / you really want to try five minutes of immortality.” It also contains one of the funniest poems on literary feuding I have ever read.


Morgan’s collection is less free-form, but he does allow for cadenzas, nursery rhymes, fables and sort-of-sonnets as the narrative progresses. It is a melancholy book in that the Martian is returning to a devastated Earth, and is homesick, for example, for two moons in the sky. What it does exceptionally well is make clear what ecological catastrophe might feel like as well as look like. 


As with Paterson, there are puzzles along the way, some of which seem inspired by Jorge Luis Borges. There is also a chime with Paterson’s feud poem: in the last work here the Martian asks: “If unlimited numbers of undying souls were each given / a typewriter, how long would it be till just one of them / stumbled upon an original thought?” 


It is almost cheeky to invoke the idea of a Martian, given the brief-lived “Martian Poetry” school, which was all about well-heeled similes of astonishment. Morgan has translated Anglo-Saxon poetry and there is something of their resigned horror here, reminiscent of poems like The Ruin or The Seafarer.


But what a joy to read and re-read and re-re-read two collections which are as intelligent as they are affecting. Given so much poetry is now aspirational verse card pap or finger-wagging hollering intolerance, it is something of a luxury to have been gifted such as complex and subtle space as these.


Zonal, by Don Paterson, Faber & Faber, £14.99. The Martian’s Regress, by JO Morgan, Cape Poetry, £10