I'll see you in church, Jimmy

GOD'S GIFT TO WOMEN by Don Paterson Faber pounds 6.99

Don Paterson's first book, minimally entitled Nil Nil, won lots of plaudits and prizes, and was notable for its intelligence, wit, and buttonholing manner. Now comes the difficult second album. It opens with a good jokey poem about poetry itself ("A poem is a little church, remember, / you, its congregation, I, its cantor"), which is harder to do than it looks - most such reflexive stuff is dismal - and ends 60-odd pages later with a little quatrain: "Of this white page, ask no more sense / than of the skies (though you may believe / the rain His Tears, the wind His grief, / the snow His shredded evidence"...

The bracket doesn't close, the full stop never comes, the poem is not listed in the Contents and arrives after several blank pages at the end of the book, rather as that little ditty pop ups as a coda at the end of the Beatles' Abbey Road, just as the stylus is about to levitate into silence.

Two other poems consist entirely of blank pages, one with four "Addenda", the other titled "On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him". The dedication of a sequel to "The Alexandrian Library" (one of the best poems in the first book) reads "For MD the bigger fibber", MD probably being the poet Michael Donaghy, the jokey compliment an allusion to Eliot's famous dedication of The Waste Land to Pound.

It's apparent from all this that this is a highly self-conscious little book, somewhere between Tristram Shandy and Muldoon's glancing obliquities; postmodern if you're impressed, tricksy if you're not. Even the two epigraphs, from something called Fun for One and St Augustine's City of God, juxtapose lowbrow information and highbrow wit, dramatising the poet's intention to take switchback rides on all the registers, and daring us to follow. We are deep in the sardonic nation-state of Pluralia where anything goes and only certain images or tones of voice will enable us to navigate between the Holocaust and the latest Nintendo game, or work out the riddling narrative of the title poem, or cope with a vocabulary that revels in words of every size, shape, provenance and locality.

The ironically-titled "God's Gift to Women" is, I think, a lament over female suffering and male brutality, written in octosyllabic couplets reminiscent of Lowell or Muldoon, and taking in along the way both Irvine Welsh territory and Eliotic yearnings for spiritual rebirth. One minute the blisters on a woman's scalded breast are "as if some angel'd shot his come / as bright as lit magnesium / across your body ...", the next "now. Let us carefully assay / that lost soteriology / which holds Christ died to free himself ..." It's both a "wee psychodrama" and an ambitious attempt to anatomise the cross of sexual compulsion "laid on my shoulder / as I grew harder, colder, / and in each subsequent affair / became the cross that others bear".

Paterson's metrics are sometimes casual to the point of sloppiness, and the rough-beast diction is deliberately unsettling, like some autodidact offering to sort you out in a Glasgow bar. But real tenderness seeps through the fierce indignation, and there's plenty to admire in such phrases as "the rain stalled like a chandelier / above the roof", "reeled in, hooked on our own groins"; "Newport comes on with a click / like the doorlight from an opened fridge. / The coal train shivers on the bridge."

"A Private Bottling", which won the Arvon Poetry Competition in 1994, is one of the book's clearest successes, a paean of praise to women (and whisky) reminiscent of Douglas Dunn, though the drink that had "a kick like a smacked puss in a trainstation" is too like throwaway Armitage for comfort. "Baldovan", "The Scale of Intensity" and "Imperial" are also fine poems. "My little church is neither high nor broad," says the poet- cantor of the Prologue. In fact it is both, complete with gargoyles and a sung mass for our life and times.