LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

DON PATERSON (b. 1963) is a poet of the present tense. Unlike most Desperadoes, who enjoy staging the past, he places his incidents, even the past ones, in the present and the future. The effect is remarkably unsettling:

the bus will let us down in another country

with the wrong streets and streets that suddenly forget

their names at crossroads or in building-sites

and where no one will have heard of the sweets we ask for

and the man will shake the coins from our fists onto the counter

and call for his wife to come through, come through and see this

and if we ever make it home again, the bus

will draw into the charred wreck of itself

and we will enter the land at the point we left off

only our voices sound funny and all the houses are gone

and the rain tastes like kelly and black waves fold in

very slowly at the foot of Macalpine Road

and our sisters and mothers are fifty years dead. (11:00: Baldovan)

The same effect was achieved by Alan Brownjohn in Ruse, but he used the past tense. Don Paterson’s sense of the past as present is his main Desperado claim.