Author: Brian Brodeur

Brian Brodeur is the author most recently of Every Hour Is Late (Measure Press 2019). New poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Hopkins Review, Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, Southern Review, 32 Poems, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Founder and Coordinator of the digital interview archive “How a Poem Happens,” Brian lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley. He teaches at Indiana University East.

Poetry in the Age of Superior Television Drama: A Review of Don Paterson’s Zonal

Zonal
by Don Paterson
(Faber & Faber, 2020, 64 pp. £14.99)

What does poetry do? What place does it have in the early 21st century anglophone world, this “age,” as Don Paterson puts it, “of superior television drama”? What singular function might it serve as distinct from, say, those other superior amusements of videogames, jazz, podcasts, World Cup soccer, graphic narratives, or haute cuisine? As a major stylistic departure from Paterson’s previous collections of concise, formally assured, and more generically traditional lyrics, Zonal insists readers at least recognize that such hulking ontological questions are being entertained.

Poetry in the Age of Superior Television Drama: A Review of Don Paterson’s Zonal full post

(3024 words, estimated 12:06 mins reading time)