Toy Fights: A Boyhood - 'A classic of its kind' William Boyd

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As a prize-winning poet, Paterson certainly knows his way around the language, and this is as brilliantly written a book as you will find anywhere.

Toy Fights: A Boyhood, by Don Paterson Book review: Toy Fights: A Boyhood, by Don Paterson

For obsessives it’s a focus – I could latch on to it to stop my brain from eating itself. I still do it. At the last school council at St Andrews [Paterson is soon to retire as professor of poetry at the university], I found myself folding an alien tortoise.Abbey Clancy, 37, enjoys a family day out to Thorpe Park with rarely seen lookalike sister Elle, 26 Mother-of-five Natasha Hamilton, 41, reveals brutal work out regime to get 's**t hot' after not recognising her postpartum body in the mirror Banged Up review: This prison 'experiment' is just a shabby excuse to torment celebs, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS My only reservation here is that, for such a clever and insightful person, he fails to make a real connection, unless I missed it, between the stupefying amounts of dope he was consuming as an adolescent and his bout of schizophrenia. Heaven knows if there is one, but it can’t stretch the bounds of probability too much. Kim Kardashian's kids North, 10, and Saint, 7, earned FIVE-FIGURE salaries for their voiceover roles in Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie

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

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Don Paterson, 59, is one of our most outstanding poets, a winner of the Whitbread poetry prize, the Costa poetry award, all three Forward prizes, the TS Eliot prize (twice), and the Queen’s gold medal for poetry. He is about to publish Toy Fights, a memoir of his life up to the age of 20. The book should carry a warning: anyone wanting a quiet book should read elsewhere – it will make you laugh aloud. It describes growing up on a Dundee council estate, an unruly school life and the beginnings of his obsession with music (Paterson was later a guitarist with the Celtic-influenced, Euro-jazz band Lammas). His gloriously gnarled humour never upstages seriousness, particularly in his account of a psychiatric breakdown as an adolescent, recalled with unself-pitying precision. At points, the pivots the book makes verges on shadowboxing. But it also feels like something unsurprising in a poet, which is to say some of it can be read as fuelled by a distaste for imprecision - a tendency online left discourse is undoubtedly given to. (and I do have a vague, not-very-worked-through theory that why so much online left discourse ends up in obscure cul-de-sacs or splinters is because people are generally no longer taught at schools the difference between rhetoric and literal speech, and people end up feeling a peculiar, doomed compulsion to defend or adopt rhetorical positions as though it was purely literal, factual speech. but that’s probably a conversation for another day.) Big Brother SPOILER: Drama ERUPTS after Noky and Trish's cursed nominations are revealed to the rest of the house As a teenager, Paterson spent four months in a psychiatric hospital after being diagnosed with a schizophrenic episode. His writing on this experience stands out for its sobering illustration of a psychotic break, or what it means to “lose touch with reality,” and for avoiding a triumphant narrative of overcoming difficulty. He ends this part of the narrative by writing that it was several years before the experience “ceased to define me,” suggesting that the presence of the breakdown hasn’t been eliminated, merely minimized.Paterson’s Dundee is labyrinthine and multi-faceted – Dundee United, Dundee hash, Dundee music, Dundee religion – every aspect is explored obsessively, “The absence of any town planning whatsoever left Dundee as a town one could only know as an insider... And what one memorises, one inevitably comes to love. It is a city that’s difficult to be bored by.” I think the part of this book that’ll stay with me longest is the stuff about his dad. It’s a great music book and also a great dad book, because these things are, to Paterson, kind of the same. There’s a sense in this that what he’s connecting to in the music he likes and responds to most are distinctly paternal emotional associations. I think his dad kind of *is* music to him - a sense enhanced by the note, something touched on in previous poetry, that dad’s connection to music was just about the last thing to go when dementia bit. I’ve read little in my life that touches it for sheer emotional impact.

Toy Fights by Don Paterson review: ditching God for music in Toy Fights by Don Paterson review: ditching God for music in

In one of several typically aphoristic moments Paterson remarks that, “the life we end up with should ideally be far less interesting than the one that got us there: we contribute most when we specialise and this generally means we have to simplify ourselves.” We should hope that this wisdom, applied to Paterson – a poet, aphorist, musician, critic and teacher, who has never entirely specialised – doesn’t prove true, because another memoir as funny and affecting as this, covering the next twenty years of his life would be very gratefully received. No doubt he would have some things to say about Tony Blair, the ‘Poetry Wars’ and the publishing world too.Don Paterson is not a poet whose work you will often hear described as memoiristic. The three time Forward Prize winner is best known for the formal control and metaphysical scope of his verse. It is not the kind of poetry that is “ like a bar-room singer, boastful / with its own huge feeling, or drowned by violins”. Indeed, anyone who has battled through Paterson’s treatise on poetic theory, P oem: Lyric, Sign, Meter – a tome that might be more appropriately titled Poetry’s Answer to String Theory– would know Paterson conceives of the form less as a substitute for a diary entry, more as “a machine for remembering itself.” Yet, in this debut memoir Paterson mines the biographical facts of his childhood and adolescence to moving effect. The young Don becomes obsessed with origami (a brilliant and wholly surprising passage), God, The Osmonds, the Boys’ Brigade and, of course, sex and girls. The book’s title refers to a horrible childhood game in Dundee, known as Toy Fights. ‘It was basically 20 minutes of extreme violence without pretext’ — something you feel Dennis the Menace would have enjoyed in his stripy jumper. Run-DMC's Darryl McDaniels reveals he was 'drinking case of Olde English a day' during alcoholism battle - and details suicidal thoughts He was born in 1963, a harsh time in Scotland. His mother was obsessed with the tenor Mario Lanza and was desperately upset when he died early — of over-eating, as it happens.

Don Paterson: ‘Poetry often involves obsessive personalities’

None of this should detract from how frequently very funny Toy Fights is. The book is beautifully crafted. To say it has a poet’s touch suggests a style that is lyrical or even glutinous, but really the language is precise, balanced and every other sentence has me wondering “How did he do that?” It’s full of set pieces, like Paterson’s description of sleeping in nylon pyjamas between nylon sheets, where “if I turned over suddenly in the night I got tased,” and “in the morning my hair was like Eraserhead, and I had learned to automatically put a foot on the floor to earth myself before I turned the lamp on”.From punch-ups and psychosis to stunning poetry! As a boy, Don Paterson endured violence, unrequited love and a terrifying drug-induced madness — but out of the angst flourished prize-winning poetry What led me to request an arc for a memoir by a poet I've never heard of, I don't know. I just had a feeling it would be worth the read, and it was, mostly. I enjoy memoirs by those close to my own age, as reading about someone else's similar experiences is almost like reminiscing with an old pal. Though Paterson grew up in Scotland, we still have plenty in common, and I really enjoyed the first part of his story as he described his childhood filled with religion, origami, and The Osmonds. I lost interest in the later parts of the book, as the author (who is also a jazz musician) delves quite heavily into music. I love listening to it, but reading about it? Not so much. Olivia Rodrigo is dating British actor Louis Partridge after meeting 'through mutual friends' and hitting it off after a number of nights out in London Paterson’s father was a part-time musician, who worked for the publisher DC Thomson, colouring the comic strips for Beano and The Dandy. but the presenter brushes off the drama and dons a sexy Storm costume as she joins Paloma Faith and Jourdan Dunn at star-studded Halloween bash